Spain

Classic road safety equipment has always been passive, waiting for drivers to lose control, leave the road and suffer an accident against it. In that moment, they are necessary to contain and redirect the vehicle, as well as to reduce its severity and consequences. However, despite their generalized deployment in our roads, we still face deaths and severe injured.
PLUG&META® technology brings a new paradigm for road equipment, allowing the infrastructure to be proactive, to start talking to users and prevent accidents from happening. It also gathers road safety data and events for the road administration.
It is a digital system that can be integrated both into new or existing equipment, for example guardrails, bridge parapets, noise barriers or acoustic wall cladding for tunnels, crash cushions and others.
This worldwide innovation, patented and fully developed by Metalesa, provides active road safety to infrastructure, that is to say, the connected and smart infrastructure will have the capability to autonomous and continuously identify risks on the road (ex: ice, bad visibility, cyclist/pedestrians/animals on the road, excessive speed...) and activate in real time an adaptative LED signalling system to make drivers aware of the risk, and hence, allowing them to anticipate safer decisions. Thanks to PLUG&META® technology, key variables of risk detection, signalling and data collection can be configured from an open intuitive management platform, called PLUG&META® TRACE.

With our innovative project we want to involve university students in road safety. Slow City is a campaign based on the creation of various short videos made by the students about the benefits of speed reduction in our cities, especially saving lifes. Our main goal is to engage the students, but also the general youth by posting the videos and raising awareness peer-to-peer.

Safe Routes to School Program in Barcelona
The "Camí escolar, espai amic" (“Safe Route to School, friendly space”) program began with the aim of increasing children´s and adolescents personal autonomy, responsibility and quality of life on their way to school or while walking around the neighborhood.

The program promotes road safety education in schools through an educational program conducted within the school and the community, and changes in the environment around the school. It is led by the Municipal Institute of Education of Barcelona (IMEB) and carried out in collaboration with the Department of Safety & Mobility of Barcelona. In each education center it includes four phases: Phase 0: We start to walk, for the definition of the project; Phase I: We explore the path, to carry out the diagnosis. Phase II. We go out into the neighborhood, to create the network of friendly spaces and celebrate the work done. Phase III: We keep the path alive, to evaluate and guarantee the sustainability of the project in the school and the educational community.

In Barcelona, police data on traffic injuries is geocoded and allows time series analyses since 2002. There are around 9,000 injuries due to road traffic crashes each year, with 11,000 persons injured, around 300 severely injured, and 15-25 fatalities in the most recent years. Pedestrians represent around 13% of all casualties, with the highest incidence occurring among young and old people.

This study aimed to evaluate the effectiveness of the Safe Routes to School (SRTS) program “Camins Escolars” conducted in Barcelona from 2006 to 2016 in reducing the number of road traffic collisions and injuries in the school environment.

The study used a pre-post quasi-experimental evaluation design, with a matched comparison group, including 64 intervention schools and 63 comparison schools. Outcomes included collisions and people injured within a radius of about 200 meters around schools during school hours, using geocoded data (2002-2019) from the local police register, and contextual variables. For each outcome measure, we fitted generalized linear mixed model with Poisson distribution.

The main problems and challenges in terms of road safety in our territory are linked to road indiscipline on the part of electric scooter and bicycle users, predominantly young and, consequently, on the atmosphere of insecurity that this causes in the rest of the actors present on public roads.
For this reason, it is necessary to tackle the problem through road safety training strategies for these groups, in addition to those others labeled as vulnerable.

With our innovative project Zero Objective we are addressing the figure of the designated driver among the youth. Although many of the students who did the activity are still in the process of getting their driver's license, they didn’t hear before about the designated driver. Thanks to ZERO OBJECTIVE PROJECT they are already very aware that they will put into practice what they learned in our designated driver workshop, generating in the attendees the commitment to take care of oneself and all the other drivers.
Zero Objective project is an awareness campaign based on the testimony of a victim of a road crash that was implemented by P(A)T during 2021 and 2022 with numerous groups of young pre-drivers (17 to 24 years old), and its power to form reliable drivers is still obvious.

In Europe, the application of Victims’ Rights Directive has been very disappointing for victims of road crashes, since a very small percentage has benefited from the Victim’s Statute. One of the reasons is the lack of recognition of victims of road crashes as victims of a crime, even though most of the time it is the result of assaults in traffic as a result of illicit, reckless and illegal conduct.

That is why we want to remind that road crash victims are also victims of violent acts that fall within the criminal sphere and that road violence causes deaths and injuries with lifelong consequences and must be protected by the Victims’ Rights Directive.