Public authorities

According to statistics, road accidents are the leading cause of death for young people, especially in the 18-24 age group. This is a good reason to raise awareness and to leverage the young population.
Many young people and young adults represent an interesting target for awareness campaigns. Not only can they help spreading awareness in society right now, but they are also highly exposed to road risks. Moreover, when properly addressed, younger people are open to learn and to change behaviour.
Motorways, Italian Police and City Authorities decided to reach out to young people by creating a project aimed at road safety culture.
The main goal is to widespread safety culture directly to students and young adults. It is also the opportunity to mobilize a huge number of national, regional and local stakeholders.
Impact and scale: The core of the initiative is made out of 40 events in 6 regions and 20 towns. Organizers expect to reach 10.000 to 20.000 people, ideally 15.000. It’s not just an easy tour of lectures in schools. Strategies for medium/long term engagement are put into practice. A concrete assessment of results is being made.

We are tasking university marketing students to reimagine how road safety is marketed across the country. This is a very difficult task as we have found that a lot of the current marketing campaigns simply do not resonate with the target audience of 18 to 25 year olds. What this project has done is get them to focus on what is currently out there and to come up with new ways to connect with the audience in an effective marketing campaign.

Motorcycle crashes are different. They follow different patterns to any other mode. They have different reasons, and they are by far more difficult to address. Motorcycle riders are considered vulnerable road users, and even those who wear good protective clothing are much more exposed to risk than road users in a protective cage or moving at lower speeds. Fatalities among motorcycle users are decreasing, but at a slower rate and with a lag when compared to car drivers. Hence, their share within total traffic fatalities has increased in recent years (currently at 16% in Europe).

Motorcycles are an important solution to urban congestion, they are environmentally friendly compared to cars carrying just one person, and they are an important economic factor for tourism.

Measures in the area of education are important and can be effective but would take decades to develop their full potential. Technological measures such as ABS are very effective but are slow to penetrate the market. It is particularly difficult to convince riders to use protective equipment. In contrast, infrastructural measures offer an opportunity for immediate impact.

The use of bicycles is becoming more and more common, both at urban and sports level, becoming a healthy and sustainable alternatives that promotes responsible mobility. The increase in the number of cyclists has caused an increase in accidents in which they are involved. According to data from the General Directorate of Traffic, 43 cyclists died on the road in 2022. This poses a new challenge for the authorities, who must promote measures for the protection of these particularly vulnerable users. The Detection and Alert System for cyclists on the Road deal with this problem. This equipment is designed to alert drivers of the presence of cyclists on the road with sufficient advance notice, allowing them to adapt their driving by reducing speed and/or increasing the safety distance. Prevention is configured as a necessary element to reduce accident rates. When it detects the presence of cyclists on the road, the system sends an alert to the intelligent LED warning signage for drivers to turn it on, reinforcing the message through a text display.When this circumstance ceases, the signal remains off, contributing to the objectives of sustainability and energy efficiency.

Austria continues to be an absolute negative example when it comes to speeding offences. The effects of speeding and excessive speed on road safety can be clearly seen in the accident statistics: Inappropriate speed was the main cause of more than a quarter of all fatal accidents between 2017 and 2021. Particularly high speeding offences have an enormous impact on the risk of accidents and the severity of injuries. Speeding drivers are convinced that they have their car under control even at high speeds.

Road works are necessary to keep our roads in optimal operating conditions, but their presence generates mobility problems, traffic jams, increased risk of accidents or insecurity. One of the most affected groups is road maintenance workers. According to data from the General Directorate of Traffic, in Spain there were 172 accidents in construction zones in 2022, of which 22 involved personnel working or walking on the road, while the rest affected workers were inside their vehicles. To address this problem, our R&D Department has designed a machine for the automatic placement and collection of cones on the road: Easy – Cone. This system, installed in vehicles of more than 3,500 kg, is capable of automatically placing the cones on the road without the worker stepping on the asphalt, being able to operate the equipment from inside the vehicle. Once the intervention has been completed, the same device collects the marking elements. This avoids the worker's exposure to road traffic, so the accident rate due to run over and/or collision on stretches affected by road work will be minimized.

Work zones on roads are especially dangerous areas for construction workers, drivers and motorcyclists, and are difficult to interpret by driver assistance systems (ADAS). Pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists Compliance with the procedures and correct maintenance of both vertical and horizontal signage allows the risks in these areas to be minimized.
An autonomous road inspection, using systems based on Computer Vision and sensors on board vehicles, allows frequent monitoring of vertical signs and objective analysis of the quality of road markings, facilitating instant corrective actions and the storage of evidence of the status of that area after each check.
Institutions such as Interbiak, Provincial Council of Bizkaia and Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa already use the ASIMOB Autonomous Road Inspector for frequent monitoring of their work areas.
This monitoring allows the risk prevention teams at the works to receive notices every time, in each check, a signal changes with respect to the previous check or fails to comply with the established procedure. In this way, immediate corrections are made and the work is maintained in optimal conditions. The solution saves evidence of all checks.

According to the 2023 report from the Spanish General Directorate of Traffic (DGT), run off accidents are the accidents with the highest fatality rates (42% of the total). This figure has seen no improvement in the last five years, but has actually worsened slightly.
With the objective of finding solutions to this serious traffic, social and health problem, and aligned with the EU-supported ‘Vision Zero’ strategy, Metalesa has led pioneering scientific research in cooperation with the University of Valencia.
Using official accident data from police databases, up to 56,607 run off accidents with victims were analysed. One of the conclusions is the need to install approved vehicle restraint systems (passive road safety), while the other main conclusion is that installing them with embedded new Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) technologies may prevent up to 43.5% of all run off accidents (active road safety).
Armed with these results, Metalesa has developed a versatile and innovative technology system, PLUG&META®, that integrates into any road equipment and – through a network of sensors – is able to detect risk scenarios on the road, warn users in real time of hazardous situations and report the data to the competent authorities.
PLUG&META® allows any existing passive equipment to be transformed into smart and connected ones. This is what we call “Active Road Safety for infrastructure”. It is easy to install, affordable, and versatile enough to be incorporated into any road system equipment. It prevents run off accidents by identifying risks in real time and signalling them in order to alert road users. Some of the main risks that can be detected and warned about include:
- Crashes against the equipment
- Problematic time zone
- Limited or reduced visibility
- Risk of ice on the carriageway
- Strong gusts of winds
- Presence of cyclists, pedestrian or animals on the road
- Excessive speeds
- Nearby traffic jams
- Roadworks
- Tight or dangerous bends
- Coordination with traffic lights

All data and control of the different uses and configurations of the technology is via the PLUG&META® TRACE platform. This management platform allows municipal or road administrators to monitor the different smart infrastructures from anywhere thanks to its remote connection.
Through the platform, administrators can check the correct functioning of each device, the road safety alerts that have been registered, the signalling method for each risk scenario, the road safety statistics generated by the smart infrastructures, user and role management and alert validation, among other options. It is a responsive platform, which can be used remotely on any device with an internet connection.
It also allows integration with other third-party management platforms already used in the administrations.
The technological system described and proposed for the award is totally innovative worldwide for its ability to integrate (in a simple, effective and economical way) all these features in a single device at the same time, simply using a plug&play connection for the sensors, those that each administration needs in each scenario.
With this solution, any road administration, and society in general, would have a wide and varied network of equipment available that can ensure the safety of users autonomously and in real time, signalling only those situations that pose a potential risk.
Roads therefore become a safer, dynamic, interactive, protected environment, which will contribute to reducing the number of road accidents.
In summary, the innovative system described above is composed of two well-structured and coherent axes: scientific-technical research on run off traffic accidents + innovative and patented digital technology that provides the infrastructure with Active (preventive) Road Safety. This is an important step in the roadmap towards Smart Roads, facilitating modal coexistence between users, and contributing to reducing the likelihood of run off accidents, which, as previously mentioned, is one of the most serious problems for road safety, as it is the type of accident that causes the most victims each year in Spain and Europe.