Working to improve road safety

More than 40,000 people die on Europe’s roads each year. Widespread deployment of active safety systems will help prevent accidents from happening

Road accidents cost the European economy around €200 billion each year. The EU has subscribed to cutting the number of fatal accidents on Europe’s roads by 50 per cent until 2010. This is a particularly ambitious undertaking with the latest EU enlargements in 2004 and 2007, bringing in 12 new Member States mostly from Central and Eastern Europe, where congestion and condition of the road network results in a high number of fatal accidents.
    
The European Commission’s Intelligent Car Communication Towards Europe-wide, safer, cleaner and efficient mobility, adopted by the European Parliament in June, is a step in the right direction.

Emergency call system
The key safety issues brought forward in that communication are the deployment of a pan-European emergency call system (eCall) by 2010 and an accelerated introduction of Electronic Stability Control (ESC), with a target of 100 per cent of new vehicles equipped with ESC by 2012. The EC report also urges stakeholders to work towards improving awareness and affordability of intelligent vehicle systems, and to improve the safety of nomadic devices.
    
As a proven active safety measure, eCall can save thousands of lives a year. European Member States need to work together with all the relevant stakeholders to accelerate its implementation.
    
eCall can cut response times of emergency services by 50 per cent on rural roads and by 40 per cent in urban areas. The full deployment of eCall in Europe is estimated to yield annual accident cost savings of up to €22 billion and annual congestion cost savings of around €4 billion.
 
eSafety forum
This issue and many more are being discussed within the eSafety Forum, established in early 2003 by the European Commission in close co-operation with industry, industrial associations and public sector stakeholders. The aim of the eSafety Forum is to support and accelerate the development, deployment and use of eSafety systems, measured against recommendations and targets identified by the various eSafety Working Groups.
    
Much has been done in recent years to improve passive safety through in-car safety systems such as anti-lock braking (ABS) and ESC. As a result, the chances of surviving an accident have greatly improved. However, more attention now needs to be given to active safety, i.e. systems that can actually prevent accidents from happening. ERTICO is working with its Partners on a number of projects to further develop active safety technologies, and to accelerate the deployment of the many safety systems and services that already exist today.

Road safety projects
The ROSATTE project, coordinated by ERTICO, aims to establish an efficient and quality-ensured data supply chain from public authorities to commercial map providers regarding safety-related road content. Up-to-date safety attributes are needed by road authorities as well as for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). The lack of access to data for users, and the need for timely updates of safety-related data constitute a major bottleneck for the large-scale use of in-vehicle road safety applications.
    
ROSATTE will be organising an open Requirements Workshop on 17 September 2008 in Paris. The project is in the process of elaborating its cases, user needs and system requirements, and the objective of the workshop is to validate these interim results.
    
The SAFESPOT integrated project, coordinated by Fiat Research Centre (CRF), is studying how intelligent vehicles and intelligent roads can cooperate to produce a breakthrough for road safety. The aim is to prevent road accidents by giving drivers a ‘Safety Margin Assistant’ that detects in advance potentially dangerous situations and extends in space and time drivers´ awareness of the surrounding environment.
    
The FeedMAP project, coordinated by ERTICO, ensures that all in-vehicle applications dependent on map data – including safety related applications – work with accurate and up-to-date information. Based on incremental updating mechanisms for delivering new map information, the project has been studying the feasibility of detecting deviations and feeding this information back to the map makers.
    
The HeavyRoute project, coordinated by the Swedish National Road and Transport Research Institute, aims to develop an advanced route guidance system for heavy goods vehicles to provide the safest and most cost-effective routes for road freight transport throughout Europe. The system will take into account road user needs, vehicle operating and environmental costs, as well as maintenance costs for the road owner/operator by considering the costs of road and bridge deterioration.
    
The Cooperative Vehicle-Infrastructure Systems (CVIS) integrated project, coordinated by ERTICO, is designing, developing and testing the technologies that will allow vehicles to communicate with each other and cooperate directly with roadside infrastructure. The advent of such technology is expected to lead to the development of numerous new and enhanced in-vehicle services for increased road safety and efficiency.
    
ERTICO is actively involved in the Field Operational Test euroFOT that will identify and coordinate in-the-field testing of new Intelligent Vehicle Systems. The purpose is to validate the effectiveness of selected ICT-based systems and functions for safer, greener and more efficient transport in a real-life environment.
    
euroFOT is one of the two first pan-European Field Operational Tests supported by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme of Information Society Technologies. Led by Ford, the project involves 28 partners, including major European vehicle manufacturers as well as leading automotive technology suppliers and research institutes, who will work together over a period of 40 months.
    
In total, eight functions will be tested on a large scale in a real environment. Longitudinal control functions such as Forward Collision Warning (FCW), Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Speed Limiter (SL) will be tested. Lateral control functions such as Blind Spot Information System (BLIS), Lane Departure Warning and Impairment Warning (LDW & IW) will also be tested. In addition, more advanced applications, such as Curve Speed Warning (CSW), Fuel Efficiency Advisor (FEA) and Safe Human Machine Interaction (SafeHMI) will be tested.
    
More than 1,500 equipped vehicles with data loggers will be driving over a period of approximately one year in various European countries. This time span will allow the statistically sound collection and processing of data. Such field operational tests will help answer several key questions that are crucial for market penetration of in-vehicle systems: the way drivers use intelligent systems, what their short and long term effects are, and how system performance could be further improved. Field operational tests such as euroFOT are addressing these issues, adding a new link in the research and development phases and making the connection between research and markets.
    
Widespread deployment of active safety systems will help prevent accidents from happening. Better road safety will save lives, but will also lead to enhanced efficiency by avoiding accident-related congestion with all its related costs. Political commitment is crucial at this stage, when many technologies and applications are ready, but still need a push for deployment. ERTICO is committed to working with its stakeholders to speed up deployment and to achieve optimal short, medium and long term solutions that will ultimately save lives, reduce costs and lead to sustainable mobility.

About ERTICO
ERTICO - ITS Europe is a multi-sector, public-private partnership dedicated to the development and deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems and Services (ITS).
   
ERTICO’s vision is of an intelligent mobility system with zero accidents, zero delays and fully informed users, where vehicles, drivers, goods and infrastructure are well interlinked and coordinated. ITS solutions reduce congestion and accidents while making transport networks more secure and reducing their impact on the environment.
   
ERTICO is convinced that the rapid Europe-wide deployment of ITS solutions can help to tackle the road safety challenge. Mr Hermann Meyer, CEO of ERTICO-ITS Europe, stresses the importance to move from research to deployment: “there is a need for an EU legislative framework in which creativity to develop Intelligent Transport Systems and Services can thrive and deployment is fast and effective”.