Walkphase

WalkPhase is a road safety product with one objective: signalised crossings that adapt to the person waiting at the kerb, so that an older pedestrian, a wheelchair user or a parent with a buggy gets the time they actually need to cross.

Today a traffic signal is blind. It cannot see who is standing there, so it gives the same walk phase to a twenty-year-old running for a bus and to an eighty-year-old with a walking frame. Across Europe those phases are calculated from an assumed walking speed (1.2 metres per second in Ireland and the United Kingdom) that many people never reach. When the phase is too short, the slower person is still in the carriageway when the traffic starts moving.

It does not have to work this way. The phone in that person's pocket already knows they have arrived at the kerb, and how quickly they walk. That is enough for the crossing to respond: to hold the walk phase for the person who needs longer, and to run unchanged for everyone else. WalkPhase is building that capability, and the underlying methods are protected by two granted United States patents and two pending applications, one of them titled adaptive pedestrian crossing control using road user devices. Independent research published in 2026 found that adaptive extension of this kind can cut the number of pedestrians stranded mid-crossing by 71 per cent while requiring any adjustment in only about one cycle in eight — a small change in signal operation for a substantial gain in safety.

Measurement is how that gets built. Before a crossing can be adjusted, someone has to establish which crossings fail and by how many seconds, and almost nowhere in Europe is that recorded. WalkPhase turns an ordinary phone into a measurement instrument for signalised crossings, needing no roadside equipment and no cameras, so the same method works at any crossing in Europe without installation or procurement. Live on the App Store since May 2026, it has documented thousands of crossings across one metropolitan area. Cork City Council's ITS Section has already acted on its measurements.

The problem is European in scale. Around 19,800 people died on Europe's roads in 2025 and more than 100,000 were seriously injured, and the Union has achieved a 15 per cent reduction since 2019 against the 31 per cent needed to halve deaths by 2030. When the European Commission adopted harmonised urban mobility indicators in July 2026, walking appeared once, as a count of trips, and accessibility was assessed at railway stations. Not one indicator asks whether a pedestrian can get across the road in the time the signal allows.

A crossing that knows who is waiting, and gives them the time they need. That is what WalkPhase exists to build.