Netherlands

The main road safety challenge we address is the lack of clear, objective insight into real-life traffic behaviour around primary schools. These locations concentrate large numbers of vulnerable and inexperienced road users—particularly children—who face increased risks in complex traffic environments. During school peak hours, traffic volumes intensify within a short time frame. Parents arriving by car, combined with cyclists and pedestrians, create congested and often chaotic situations. This leads to unsafe conditions such as unclear routing, risky crossing behaviour, informal parking, and frequent near-misses. A key issue is that traditional traffic data methods—such as counts, surveys or incidental observations—fail to capture the dynamic interactions between different road users. As a result, many risks remain invisible or are only addressed after incidents occur.
In addition, there is often a mismatch between infrastructure, behaviour and organisation. Measures are frequently implemented in isolation, limiting their effectiveness.
We address these challenges by making risks visible before accidents occur, focusing on school environments where improving everyday safety for children has the greatest societal impact.

Hasselt University in Diepenbeek, Belgium, is home to one of the top transport engineering graduate programmes, the Transportation Research Institute (IMOB), and as such, attracts top talent from around the world. Around 80% of international students (713 students at the time) come from outside the European Union; meanwhile, the urban environment around Hasselt’s campus is a complex cycling network reflecting the mature cycling culture in Belgium, wherein the majority of Hasselt students commute by bicycle.

For the 713 students coming from outside the EU, largely from Africa and Asia, this can feel like a culture shock, leading to unsafe road behaviour or avoidance of cycling altogether, despite it typically being the most inexpensive and reliable commuting mode for students. A needs assessment survey to 53 international students found outsized fears around cycling and walking to campus, and pinpointed 14 critically unsafe cycling intersections.

This assessment revealed a need for dedicated orientation sessions for international students on cycling, targeted course materials on the local cycling and pedestrian culture, an awareness campaign, and targeted recommendations for top unsafe intersections around campus. These activities would not only keep students safe, but also support their inclusion and integration into Hasselt’s vibrant student culture.

Road collisions involving commercial vehicles continue to be one of the most significant road safety challenges across Europe. A large proportion of these incidents are linked to human factors particularly driver fatigue, distraction, and drowsiness which remain among the leading contributors to serious crashes on European roads.
Long working hours, demanding schedules, and the cognitive load of driving in complex traffic environments can affect even the most experienced professional drivers. Yet, traditional fleet safety approaches often rely on retrospective incident review, providing little opportunity to intervene at the moment risk emerges. By the time issues are identified, the opportunity for prevention has often passed.
Compounding this, many existing safety systems generate high volumes of inaccurate or low-value alerts, eroding driver trust and creating alert fatigue. This makes it harder for safety teams to focus on meaningful risk and harder for drivers to engage positively with safety programmes.
This initiative addresses these challenges by shifting fleet safety from a reactive to a proactive model combining real-time road awareness and driver-state intelligence to identify risk early, support drivers with timely in-cab guidance, and recognise safe behaviour. The goal is straightforward: prevent collisions before they happen and help create safer roads for everyone.

In Europe, roadworks and active emergency response are among the highest-risk situations on the road, not just for passing traffic, but for the people working at the roadside and the crews racing to those who need them.

The scale of the problem is significant. In Sweden, a TMA vehicle is struck every 12.6 days. In Flanders alone, there were 444 injury accidents and 5 fatal crashes at or near roadwork sites in 2025. Emergency services face a parallel challenge: modern vehicles are quieter and drivers are increasingly distracted, meaning sirens and warning lights register later, costing emergency vehicles time they cannot afford to lose. In the Netherlands, research estimates a 40 to 90% reduction in ambulance-related collisions where digital alerting is applied. Beyond collisions, in cases of out-of-hospital cardiac arrest, each minute of reduced arrival time increases a patient's chance of survival by approximately 6%.

For decades, road workers and emergency responders have relied on just two warning channels: visual signals and audible ones. Both are losing effectiveness as vehicles become quieter and driver attention becomes harder to hold. A third, digital channel is needed: a warning that reaches the driver directly, inside the vehicle, regardless of ambient noise or momentary distraction.

This is the challenge that Digital Alerting, the in-vehicle warning system developed by HAAS Alert, addresses. Through two applications, Roadworks Warning (RWW) and Emergency Vehicle Approaching (EVA), drivers receive in-vehicle notifications before they would otherwise see or hear a hazard, giving them real, usable time to slow down, move over, or clear a path.

Because seconds save lives.

The primary challenge addressed is the legacy, reactive model of urban traffic safety, where city planners traditionally implement safety measures only after a history of collisions is recorded. This approach means infrastructure flaws are identified too late, relying on historical crash data rather than prevention.

Additionally, current methods struggle to ensure equity in urban safety design, often failing to effectively integrate vulnerable road users (VRUs) - such as pedestrians and cyclists - into risk simulations. Municipalities also face the hurdle of deploying expensive on-street hardware to gather data, slowing down critical safety interventions. Finally, local authorities frequently lack the objective metrics needed to rank interventions and weigh capital investment costs against potential injury savings before making decisions.

Roadscor fundamentally disrupts this by virtualizing physical networks into dynamic Digital Twins. By shifting from reactive crashes to a proactive risk framework, the platform uses advanced predictive conflict analytics to evaluate infrastructure hazards, traffic volumes, and behavioral patterns simultaneously. It quantifies risk based on conflict likelihood, controllability, and severity, allowing cities to protect VRUs and maximize safety gains within their budgets without relying on costly hardware.

Roadscor tackles critical road safety challenges by shifting from reactive to proactive design evaluation, especially for vulnerable road users (VRUs) at urban intersections. Traditional safety assessments rely heavily on historical crash data or near-miss observations, which are often incomplete or outdated. This limits the ability to anticipate and prevent future incidents. Roadscor introduces a groundbreaking methodology that uses advanced traffic simulation and automotive-grade scenario analysis (aligned with ISO 21448 – Safety of the Intended Functionality) to identify both known and unknown high-risk traffic conflicts - before they occur.

By simulating all physically possible interactions between road users, including pedestrians and cyclists, Roadscor enables traffic engineers to quantify safety risks and evaluate the impact of design changes or behavioral measures prior to implementation. This data-driven approach supports more effective, evidence-based decision-making and helps prioritize interventions where they will have the greatest impact. Ultimately, Roadscor empowers cities and road authorities to design safer, more inclusive infrastructure, accelerating progress toward Vision Zero goals.

For a long time our roads have prioritized movement, and their design was left to traffic engineers.

But with the many challenges we face, streets need to serve more purposes beyond traffic flow. Streets are shared public spaces that should serve more goals (SDGs) and should reflect the diverse needs of all users. To turn this conversation around we launched “De rechtvaardige straat”(The Just Street).

The five guiding principles of the manifesto reframe how streets can be viewed and shaped. Creating a more inclusive, safe, and a more social and vibrant space between buildings. Safety is emphasized through thoughtful design that invites walking, cycling, and lingering without fear. Key elements include variety, accessibility, and active public participation in shaping the street environment.

Supported by thousands of citizens and hundreds of organizations, we offer this community actionable tools: inspiring content, events, and an annual action week. Together, we reclaim the street as a truly public space—where even drivers feel safe from making unintended mistakes, and all users can coexist with confidence and care.

Our goal is nothing less than systemic change: towards streets that foster safety, equity, and livability for everyone. Through De Rechtvaardige Straat, we are building a new understanding of what purpose streets serve and in parallel outline a new standard for road design and use—one that values every life and every journey. More safe streets as a result of more just and human centered streets.

We are solving the two main unsettled topics in Camera and LiDAR Systems and human vision in traffic situations. The internally developed Visibility Label, featuring a new universally applicable reference color, addresses the first topic, which is the lack of a universal method for quantifying the visibility of complex shapes such as cars, bikes, and busses. Crystal Glass Pigments provide a solution for the second unresolved issue, focusing on improving the functionality (i.e. visibility) of coatings on vehicles. By formulating new colors with this innovative additive, the coatings become significantly better visible for camera systems, human vision at night, and LiDAR systems 24/7.

Nature in Gelderland is thriving, with a growing number of wild animals. This is a beautiful phenomenon, but unfortunately, it also brings an increased risk of accidents involving wild animals. The chances of a poor outcome for the animal are high, but there is also a significant risk of material damage and severe consequences for the driver. The risk of collisions with wildlife is especially higher during certain periods, specific times, and at certain locations. Think of dawn and dusk, and the transition to winter or summer time.

In the past, the Province of Gelderland has taken various measures by adjusting the infrastructure and influencing the behavior of wild animals. Examples of these measures include the installation of warning signs, wildlife grids, and boar disappearance blocks. However, it turns out that more is needed to tackle the problem.

Drivers often underestimate the risk of animals being along the roads in the forests. Despite the recommended speed limits, they often drive too fast and are not always aware of the risk of animals along the roads. Therefore, the province of Gelderland wants to place more emphasis on the behavior of road users. In response to this need, creative behavioral agency andc and behavioral agency Dijksterhuis and Van Baaren have developed a behavior-oriented approach, including interventions, to encourage road users to adhere to the recommended speed limits.

In the Netherlands cycling is the most important way of daily transportation. Sadly, over the past 10 years the amount of bicycle casualties in the Netherlands has increased by 40%, which is expected to increase even more by the popularity of the E-bike. In 2023, 71.000 cyclists were treated in hospitals (60% of all traffic casualties) with 12.500 having traumatic brain injury (16%). Traumatic brain injury often leads to permanent disability as neurons have no or just little recovery potential. A very simple and effective intervention is the voluntary promotion of bicycle helmet with estimated reduction of death 70% and brain injury by 60%. In Denmark, voluntary promotion of bicycle helmets has been very effective in reducing the amount of casualties, especially in children. When we started in 2022 with the first National Day of the bicycle helmet only 2% of the Dutch cyclists were wearing helmets.