Policy makers

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?

One of the problems faced by every road safety body is that the consequences of drink driving are abstract to people that have never felt them. It’s hard to imagine losing your licence, ending up in prison, killing someone, or being left with permanent disabilities because most of us have never experienced these things. We can logically understand them, but we don’t feel them. For the first time, using Virtual Reality, we could create a shocking and deeply resonant immersive experience and make these consequences feel real.
Data collected by the organisation showed that there had been a resurgence in drink driving in Ireland. A legacy of historical anti-drink driving advertising had reduced the behaviour, but a new cohort of younger people, who have never been exposed to it, were drinking and driving anew. These findings instigated creating a campaign to help reduce this worrying trend against younger adult males who considered themselves invincible and immune to road traffic collisions. For the first time, using Virtual Reality (VR), we could create a shocking and deeply resonant immersive experience and make these consequences feel real.
Our response was ‘Consequences’: a cut-through VR experience that toured the country and challenged the user by putting them in the shoes of a drunk driver, bringing this serious message home in a completely new and immersive way. Different storylines allowed the user to experience the full extent of the agonising consequences of drink driving—from injury to prosecution.

We’re addressing multiple road safety problems:`

- Improving the work safety of road inspectors by reducing time being physically in the middle of the road and reducing multitasking while driving.
- Improving road safety for cars, motorcycles and bicyclist by reducing potholes and defect road inventory such as faded road signs, damaged bollards, etc.
- Improving road safety for pedestrians by mapping crosswalks with worn-out lane markings as well as pavement uplift that causes people to fall.

Image examples can be found attached

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

Governments and administration need to do more to improve road safety. But, the statistics for road traffic accidents are still shocking. Around 90% of all road accidents are caused by human error. That means every year, about a million people die because of other people's mistakes, carelessness, or irresponsibility. So it makes you wonder, are we doing good enough for road safety? Safe Driving, aims to help and informing whole road users about every single issue in Road Traffic from A to Z.