Improve vehicles and infrastructure

The International Conference on Young Road Users’ Safety
14 July 2026 11:00 – 18:00
Porsche Bucharest Vest 2, Soseaua Centurii 41, Chiajna, Ilfov
Romania
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Vienna Airport Ground Handling Services is a leading full-service provider with more than 70 years of experience and around 1,800 employees across all operational areas.
Through a structured, company-wide safety initiative, we have reached up to 1,800 employees, achieving an 88% participation rate across the workforce.
Our programme delivers more than 9,000 hours of safety training, evaluation, and preparation, across 10+ targeted safety interventions, addressing key behavioural risks such as distraction, substance influence, and unsafe driving.
This holistic and scalable approach has resulted in a 9% year-on-year reduction in accidents on average, alongside a clear and measurable decline in operational incidents.
Beyond measurable impact, we have established a sustainable, organization-wide safety culture, embedding safety leadership and accountability at all levels.
We believe this combination of quantifiable results, behavioural transformation, and organizational commitment positions us as a best-practice example for road safety excellence in the aviation sector.
Thursday, June 25, 2026
Roadside workers are among the most exposed and least protected road users in Europe. Every day, road maintenance crews, recovery operators and temporary workers perform their duties only a few meters away from live traffic.

According to the Spanish Traffic Authority (DGT), seven roadside workers were killed on interurban roads in Spain in 2024: five tow-truck operators and two road maintenance and conservation workers. Similar risks exist across Europe wherever temporary roadworks, lane closures or roadside interventions take place.

Research by RACE-GOODYEAR and Ponle Freno-AXA has shown that a significant proportion of pedestrian fatalities on roads occur during signaling and roadside intervention activities, particularly in low-visibility conditions and on high-speed roads.

The underlying challenge is operational blindness. Temporary work zones have traditionally been protected through physical signage and manual reporting. Control centres often have limited real-time visibility of the exact location and status of roadside operations. If a cone is displaced, knocked over or removed, there is no automatic notification. Drivers only become aware of the hazard when they physically see the work zone, sometimes too late to react safely.

Our initiative addresses this challenge by transforming temporary roadside hazards into digital, real-time traffic events that can be shared instantly across the connected mobility ecosystem.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Local authorities play a crucial role in road safety, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists. In Sweden, serious injuries among cyclists have not decreased at the same rate as injuries among car occupants, while pedestrians’ falls account for a large share of severe injuries in the road transport system. Municipal action is therefore essential for achieving Vision Zero and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Despite this responsibility, many municipalities lack a systematic approach to road safety. National follow-up has shown that only a small proportion of municipalities demonstrate a high level of systematic work for safe walking and cycling. Municipalities often focus on infrastructure planning but struggle to integrate road safety into procurement, maintenance, workplace travel, construction projects and communication activities.

Another challenge is that road safety is frequently treated as a standalone issue rather than being integrated into broader sustainability, public health and urban development agendas. Municipalities have requested practical support on how to translate Vision Zero, the Stockholm Declaration and Agenda 2030 into everyday decision-making.

Trafiksäkerhetslyftet (Systematic Traffic Safety Implementation by Local Authorities) was developed to address these challenges by providing a practical framework for systematic, organisation-wide road safety management at the local level.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
To warn road users of a danger on a road section, for instance following an accident, and to divert the traffic in a safe direction, traditionally wind-powered torches made of wax material are used. This solution implies some relevant road safety problems. First, exposure and risks for operators, on one side of being hit by vehicles while torches are placed on the road surface and turned on, on the other side of being wounded by open flames. Furthermore, damage of the asphalt on which torches are placed during use, compromising its useful time, and lack of practicality since they are made of fibrous materials and wax and can’t be extinguished even if no longer needed.
Every year road workers and emergency operators are injured or killed while deploying temporary warning devices in live traffic environments. Flash-Led was conceived to eliminate this exposure by enabling remote deployment of warning systems and significantly improving operator safety.
The present invention relates to a road signalling system aimed to substitute the traditional use of wind-powered torches, allowing an effective signalling of danger and/or obstruction and/or traffic channelling, ensuring the complete operators safety, avoiding infrastructure damages and, furthermore, informing road users through road navigation platforms. The solution includes n. 4 electric movable elements signalling with high visibility LEDs, remotely controlled by an operator from a plurality of possible schemes and arranged in an easily transportable container, which can reports the danger to users through platforms like Google/Waze etc.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Road safety data across Europe originates from many disconnected sources — road operators, national access points, emergency services, OEMs, and driver communities — yet no single trusted platform unifies these into consistent, real-time alerts for drivers. This fragmentation means that hazards such as stopped vehicles, wrong-way drivers, approaching emergency vehicles, slippery roads, and traffic jam tails are either reported too late, duplicated, or never reach the driver at all.
A second challenge is the low accuracy and timeliness of available data. Official sources can lag 8–10 minutes behind real incidents, while unvalidated crowd-sourced data risks being unreliable. Without a mechanism to merge, deduplicate, and rank competing data feeds, drivers receive conflicting or imprecise warnings. A third challenge is unequal access: safety alerts today depend heavily on which app or vehicle brand a driver uses, leaving many road users uninformed. Finally, OEMs struggle to meet Euro NCAP's 2026 "Safe Driving" requirements without a standardised external data pipeline, creating a barrier to delivering in-car hazard warnings at scale.
Be-Warned directly addresses all of these gaps by acting as a single, trusted hub that consolidates multi-source traffic data into verified, real-time safety intelligence for every driver, regardless of app, vehicle, or region.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
Roadside workers are among the most exposed and least protected road users in Europe. Every day, road maintenance crews, recovery operators and temporary works teams perform their duties only a few meters away from live traffic.
According to the Spanish Traffic Authority (DGT), seven roadside workers were killed on interurban roads in Spain in 2024: five tow-truck operators and two road maintenance and conservation workers. Similar risks exist across Europe wherever temporary roadworks, lane closures or roadside interventions take place.
Research by RACE-GOODYEAR and Ponle Freno-AXA has shown that a significant proportion of pedestrian fatalities on roads occur during signalling and roadside intervention activities, particularly in low-visibility conditions and on high-speed roads.
The underlying challenge is operational blindness. Temporary work zones have traditionally been protected through physical signage and manual reporting. Control centres often have limited real-time visibility of the exact location and status of roadside operations. If a cone is displaced, knocked over or removed, there is no automatic notification. Drivers only become aware of the hazard when they physically see the work zone, sometimes too late to react safely.
Our initiative addresses this challenge by transforming temporary roadside hazards into digital, real-time traffic events that can be shared instantly across the connected mobility ecosystem.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
ASPI acknowledges the need to build an integrated ecosystem encompassing infrastructure, vehicles, traffic management, and data governance.
On a motorway network, one of the most critical risks arises from the coexistence of live traffic and maintenance worksites, which exposes two groups of people to hazard every day: road users and site operators. Managing this overlap across an infrastructure of around 3,000 km calls for an innovative and systemic approach.
The “Advanced Traffic Mobility Management System” project therefore, stems from the clear goal of structurally reducing risk exposure by acting in an integrated manner on planning and information, such as:
optimizing the planning of roadworks by scheduling them in time windows with lower traffic volume, to reduce interference between traffic flows and operational activities; strengthening user information through advanced tools to anticipate traffic conditions and enable safer, more informed mobility choices.
The initiative is fully aligned with the EU’s Vision Zero-zero road deaths by 2050 and halving deaths and serious injuries by 2030.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
The speed of modern highway traffic represents one of the greatest risks for highway maintenance and patrol operators. Traditional safety measures such as arrow boards, flashing lights and roadside signage remain essential, but they are increasingly challenged by driver distraction and the growing complexity of traffic environments.
On the R1 expressway in Slovakia, maintenance and patrol vehicles frequently operate in live traffic conditions where approaching drivers may not recognize a hazard until it is too late to react safely. Even a brief lapse in attention can lead to severe collisions, injuries, secondary crashes and significant disruption to traffic flow.
Via Pribina identified a critical need to close the gap between roadside incidents and driver awareness. Traditional warning systems provide information only when the hazard becomes visible. However, at motorway speeds, valuable reaction time may already be lost.
The challenge was therefore to create a solution that would deliver safety information directly to approaching drivers before they reached the incident location.
The objective was to transform conventional roadside safety measures into proactive digital alerts capable of supporting safer driving behaviour, reducing collision risks and improving protection for both road workers and motorists.
Wednesday, June 24, 2026
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.
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