Belgium

Parents play a crucial role in deciding how their children go to school. Most of the time, they chose which mode of transport their children use and which route they take to reach the school gate. And although cycling to school seems like an obvious choice for many children, for their parents, it is not. Why? Because for parents, safety concerns are decisive and often trump all other considerations. Surveys in the Belgian city of Leuven, for example, show that especially women think traffic in their neighborhood is not safe enough to allow children to cycle to school independently.

That is not just a sad observation, but also one that deserves more scrutiny. Which situations do mothers deem unsafe? And, more importantly, why? What can be done about it, so more parents are comfortable with their children cycling to school?

Young pedestrians and cyclists are vulnerable in traffic. Crash figures show that children and young people are more likely to be victims of road crashes when they start to travel independently and/or switch to a new means of transport with which they have less experience. Among young pedestrians and cyclists in Flanders, the number of road casualties increases from the age group of 6 to 11 years. Specifically among young cyclists, this increase continues in the age group of 12 to 15 years.
In the past, traffic safety and mobility education in primary education in Flanders was often limited to theoretical lessons on knowledge of traffic rules and traffic signs, usually for the age group of 6 to 12 years. With our practice-oriented pedestrian and bicycle certificates, we want to provide practice-oriented traffic safety and mobility education from kindergarten onwards (2.5 years).

The Mobilidata program addresses the lack of centralized, timely and qualitative real time traffic warnings in the G2B2C ecosystem.

To fulfil the need of road users to receive and be able to cooperate with (return) real time traffic warnings, Mobilidata implemented for the entire Flanders- region and on the entire public road network the European defined C-ROADS standardized Cooperation model of C-ITS or Cooperative ITS. In Mobilidata 31 different use cases are addressed – see overview of all use cases under 7.2 -images

Mobilidata is the Flanders hub where real time road safety related information comes together from these sources:
• Governmental regional and local level: e.g. roadside infrastructure like traffic controllers, variable message signs,
• Private/corporate level: e.g. Directive 2010/40/EU, EU specified SRTI (safety related traffic information) - vehicle sensor based real time warnings.
• Road user ‘community’ based: Events reported, and event feedback generated by road users.

Each of these 3 source information systems has its strengths and weaknesses, offering a neutral environment where they can be combined and distributed to all interested in a non-commercial setting is possible in a road-safety promoting context.

Road safety information in Mobilidata can be clustered in 3 subgroups per topic in the 29 on-street use case list + an extra subgroup of 2 off-street policy related use cases:
• Road regulation & policies
• Warnings / dangerous situations
• Connected infrastructure / traffic lights

In Belgium, as in Europe and large parts of the Western world, life expectancy is ever increasing. While this "aging" is made possible by very comprehensive preventive or curative health care, this certainly does not eliminate all the cognitive or motor impairments associated with aging. In addition, older people are also becoming increasingly mobile, and more specifically, they are using their own vehicle or car up to a higher age.

As people age, two risks that are often used in the context of road safety become important:
- Accident risk: the likelihood to be involved in an accident.
- Injury risk: the likelihood of injury, given an accident has occurred.

With this product, the senior selfTest, we focus on the triggers for accident risk with senior drivers.

Safe participation in traffic, in the context of an ageing population, presupposes two things: "driving skills" and "fitness to drive". Driving skills are strongly linked to learning processes, gaining experience, vehicle control and traffic insight. Fitness to drive has more to do with the physical and mental abilities of the driver: health, sensory and cognitive abilities, influence of alcohol, drugs or medication, etc.

Older road users usually have a very extensive mobility and traffic experience, and associated with that generally overall good driving skills. However, as drivers age, some of the mental and/or physical capacities needed to put those skills to good use gradually decrease. In other words, fitness to drive decreases. Examples are: reduced vision (sharpness, night blindness, etc.), poor hearing, higher reaction times, reduced muscle control or muscle strength, etc.

This decline in capacities is likely to proceed in two speeds. For most people it can be expected that this is a gradual process, which may also be partially absorbable or slowed down. Barring sudden illness and accidents, the decline in physical or mental functionality is a process of several decades. However, when looking at the oldest age categories, it can be expected that a quicker decrease in physical or mental functionality occurs as a result of (a higher likelihood of) more grave illnesses.

Although road users compensate for this natural decline in capacities to some extent (e.g. by driving less at night, driving slower, etc.), there is still a general risk that one's own skills and fitness to drive will be overestimated, or that a decline in skills and suitability will eventually go too fast. In other words, if a self-regulating compensation mechanism is used, it may not be enough to continue to drive “safely”. Different supporting measures need to be developed if we wish senior drivers to truly remain independently safely mobile.

With the SelfTest we present a product that aims at increasing awareness with senior drivers on the importance of psycho-cognitive factors and their own capacities in relation to accident risk, and therefor safe and comfortable driving.

The SelfTest, its development and use is described in the paragraph “project activities”.
The relevance towards improving road safety, compared to other actions taken to support safe driving by senior drivers, is described in the paragraph “evaluation”

Unsafety is the main reason for people not to cycle. What makes cycling unsafe? It can be due to both objective elements such as inappropriate infrastructure, but also subjective elements such as the behaviour of other road users. To get more people cycling, it is important to locate, identify and address both elements.