The first Drive2theFuture Workshop will be held in Brussels on 6 March. Drive2theFuture is a Horizon 2020 project, endorsed by FERSI, and coordinated by CERTH/HIT. The project deals with user acceptance and training issues of automated vehicles for all transportation modes. More information is available at drive2thefuture.eu.
FERSI is pleased to announce the publication of its new position paper. The paper intends to offer guidance to Member States on developing a national road safety programme. Its main message is that a road safety programme must be based on scientifically sound evidence in order to ensure that it focuses on the most relevant issues (i.e. made the correct ‘diagnosis’) and implements the most appropriate treatments (i.e. selected the best ‘therapy’). The paper results in five concrete recommendations for both the diagnosis and therapy stages.
Download ‘Towards and evidence-based national road safety programme’.
The 10th Young Researchers Seminar will be held on 9-11 June 2021 in Portorož , Slovenia. It will be hosted by the Faculty of Maritime Studies and Transport of the University of Ljubljana, and supported by ECTRI, FEHRL and FERSI. For more information see this flyer.
We are very pleased to announce that the Department of Technology, Management and Economics of the Danish Technical University DTU joined FERSI again. With DTU we have another strong and high quality research organisation on board. DTU brings the number of FERSI members to 21 from an equal amount of European countries.
FERSI published a technical paper that sets out a scientifically valid method for assessing the prevalence of mobile phone use of car drivers, cyclists and pedestrians through on-road observations and self-reports. Mobile phone use is an important key performance indicator (KPI) for road safety. Mobile phones are a major source of distraction and contribute to the occurrence of accidents. Unfortunately, most countries do not yet have a reliable picture of the size of the problem and the developments over time. FERSI considers the current guidelines as an excellent basis for collecting scientifically reliable information about this highly relevant road safety issue.
Download ‘Guidelines for assessing the prevalence of mobile phone use in traffic‘.
The TRA2020 conference will take place in Helsinki from 27 to 30 April 2020. Registration has opened now at traconference.eu. TRA, the Transport Research Arena, is a large biannual European research and technology conference on transport and mobility. TRA2 brings together experts from around the world to discuss the newest innovations and future of mobility and transport. The theme of TRA2020 is Rethinking transport – towards clean and inclusive mobility.
On 18 September the European project SaferAfrica concluded its work with the conference “Results and future perspectives for road safety in Africa” in Tunis, Tunisia.
The project started 3 years ago. It successfully contributed to creating favourable conditions and opportunities for improving road safety and traffic management in African countries, among others by setting up a Dialogue Platform between Africa and Europe. The SaferAfrica website provides an overview of the project activities and access to all publications and deliverables.”
FERSI fully supports the European Commission’s policy on Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). It its recently released statement (PDF) FERSI concludes that the use of KPIs can be of great help for both monitoring road safety developments, and identifying the most promising interventions. It is emphasized though that a KPI policy will only be successful if the agreed KPIs have a proven relationship with road safety and if Members States are prepared to collect the required data on a regular basis, and in a similar format.
The 6th International Symposium on Highway Geometric Design will take place from 28 June until 1 July 2020 in Amsterdam. Abstract submission is open until April 30th 2019. For more information see https://ishgd2020.org/
At the ERTRAC Annual Conference 2019, early April in Brussels, ERTRAC published the Connected Automated Driving Roadmap. This document is an update of the 2017 roadmap. At this same event, ERTRAC also presented the Safe Road Transport Roadmap, entitled Towards Vision Zero: Roads without Victims. Both documents can be downloaded from the ERTRAC website.Regarding vehicle automation we also refer to the 2018 FERSI publication Safety through automation?.
