SafetyCube project organised a Road Safety Workshop at BRSI in Brussels on September 27^th, 2016, with more than 40 participants, regarding the first viewing of the SafetyCube Decision Support System (DSS). The purpose of the workshop was to illustrate how existing road safety knowledge can be collected, structured and distilled into the SafetyCube DSS that can be queried in terms of safety risk factors and potential countermeasures, including crash scenarios. The key road safety stakeholders had the opportunity to watch the methodology followed and preview the SafetyCube DSS prototype, allowing vivid discussion for its further improvement.

The presentations are currently available:

SafetyCube Workshop Brussels Agenda Sep2016

SafetyCube Workshop Opening Thomas Sep2016

SafetyCube Workshop Inspiration and implementation Elvik Sep2016

EC_RTD SafetyCube Workshop Brussels Bird Sep2016

SafetyCube Workshop Scientific Basis Martensen Sep2016

SafetyCube Workshop DSS Design Yannis Sep2016

SafetyCube Workshop Cost Benefit Information Martensen Sep2016

SafetyCube Workshop Accident Scenarios Niewohner Sep2016

SafetyCube Workshop Brussels Aigner-Breuss & Papadimitriou-Sep2016

SafetyCube project results were presented at the Safety 2016 World Conference, organised by the World health Organisation and took place on 18-21 September 2016 in Tampere, Finland. Akis Theofilatos from NTUA presented the progress of the development of the SafetyCube European Road Safety Decision Support System (DSS). Catherine Pérez from ASPB presented the results from the research on road accidents serious injuries reporting in Europe.

The presentations are currently available:

SafetyCube-Safety2016-Presentation-Theofilatos

SafetyCube-Safety2016-Presentation-Perez

On June 22-24, 2016, SafetyCube organised successfully a Plenary Meeting in Athens, in which more than 35 participants gathered to discuss the progress and next steps of the SafetyCube project.

Within SafetyCube’s methodology workpackage, guidelines for summarizing research results (synopsis) – including meta-analysis – have been discussed and improved. Moreover, behavior, infrastructure and vehicle workpackages discussed the specific issues and particularities involved in each field, including coding progress of studies on road accident risk factors and road safety countermeasures. A major part of the discussions was also dedicated on the design and the functionalities of the SafetyCube Decision Support System (DSS).

Within SafetyCube, we develop detailed guidelines for the registration and monitoring of serious road injuries (MAIS3+ casualties). On May 24^th, we organized a workshop in The Hague to present our preliminary guidelines and discuss how these guidelines could be further improved to meet all user needs. About 30 participants from 13 countries and organizations like ETSC and FEVR attended the workshop and provided feedback on the preliminary guidelines.

The workshop started with a welcome from Peter van der Knaap, managing director of SWOV Institute for road safety research, an introduction to the SafetyCube project by project coordinator Pete Thomas, a welcome from Maria Teresa Sanz-Villegas from the EC and an introduction to the guidelines.

Before discussing the preliminary guidelines into more detail, we discussed current and planned practices around Europe and how we could improve access to hospital data. In the afternoon we presented and discussed our detailed guidelines for each of the three ways described by the EC to estimate the number of serious road injuries: 1) applying correction factors to police data , 2) use of hospital data, and 3) linking police data and hospital data. Finally, we presented and discussed our preliminary conclusions regarding the comparability of the different methods.

SafetyCube was part of the Transport Research Arena (TRA) conference activities with presentations in both a formal session and the exhibition area. A session of invited speakers presented five H2020 projects: InDeV, PROSPECT, SafetyCube, SENIORS, and XCYCLE.  The session, chaired by SafetyCube coordinator Pete Thomas, was well attended. Prof. George Yannis and Eleonora Papadimitriou presented the project and participated in an active discussion period afterwards. SafetyCube was also presented by Rob Thomson in the European Commission Market Place “Speakers Corner” in the conference exhibition area.

The TRA conference provided an opportunity for the five projects consortia to meet and exchange information. SafetyCube has already links to the InDeV project through an earlier workshop and this cooperation is planned to continue.

The presentation is currently available:

SafetyCube TRA 2016 Presentation Yannis

On March 1-3, 2016, SafetyCube partners gathered in Barcelona to discuss the progress and next steps of the SafetyCube project.

Within SafetyCube’s methodology workpackage, guidelines for literature search and for summarizing research results – including meta-analysis – have been developed, which together with the revised template for coding research studies, ensures a uniform way of addressing different risks and measures in different areas of interest. That way it will be possible to perform overall quantitative analyses over studies that are otherwise hardly comparable. First results are planned to become available late autumn 2016.

Moreover, behavior, infrastructure and vehicle workpackages discussed the specific issues and particularities involved in each field.

A major part of the discussions was dedicated on the design and the functionalities of the SafetyCube Decision Support System (DSS), on the basis of the feedback from stakeholders received so far during the various SafetyCube workshops, as well as on the so far experiences from the analyses carried out within SafetyCube.

A Decision Support System for road safety stakeholders is being developed in SafetyCube. One important feature of this tool would be to facilitate Cost Benefit Analyses. Hence, SafetyCube will provide guidelines for the determination of crash costs and will determine crash costs for all EU member states. Specific attention is paid to the costs of serious road injuries. InDeV, another Horizon 2020 project, also aims to collect information on costs of crashes in different EU countries. To make sure decision makers have the best available information and to prevent sending two similar questionnaires to crash costs experts in EU member states, the two projects decided to work together.

Crash costs experts from SafetyCube and InDeV had a very fruitful first meeting together on January 28^th in The Hague and decided to liaise on the collection of information on costs of crashes. We will have additional joint meetings in the future.

An article on SafetyCube project by Concetta Durso, Project Manager of ERF, was published in the Italian specialised magazine “Strade & Autostrade”.

The progress of the SafetyCube project regarding the identification of user needs for the planned Decision Support System (DSS) and “the hot topics” that should be addressed in the DSS is presented. Special focus is given to the SafetyCube Stakeholder Workshop, which took place in Brussels in June 2015, including the objectives, the activities and the results of this Workshop. Reference is also made to the second SafetyCube Stakeholder Workshop, held in Ljubljana in October 2015 and to the activities that took place based on the results of the previous Workshop.

The article is currently available:

SafetyCube Il Notiziario – Strade&Autostrade – January 2016

 

In view of developing the European Road Safety Decision Support System (DSS) within the European Commission co-financed research project SafetyCube, all European road safety experts and stakeholders interested are invited to participate at our survey which is available via the SafetyCube Project website and rank the “Road Safety Priority Topics” to be included at the DSS. All the results of this survey will be constantly made available at this website.

Start the survey now:

SafetyCube Road Safety Priority Topics Survey

SafetyCube’s work package 4 aims at identifying risks and measures which are related to road user behaviour (like driving under influence, not wearing protective devices or road safety campaigns measure wise). In order to facilitate the Decision Support System risk factors and counter-measures will be assessed regarding accident contribution and effectiveness.

In a first step it is important to identify all kind of risk factors and possible measures and list them exhaustively. WP4 has received and processed valuable input on that from stakeholder workshops.

In parallel, the process of drafting an three-level taxonomy of risks and measures has started and topics like distraction, drunk driving, speeding etc. have been assigned to involved partner organisations preliminarily. Since not all road user related risk factors are tackled by a road user related measure (e.g. ignition interlocks to prevent drunk driving) work on that is coordinated with WP 5, 6.

Furthermore, studies on various related topics are being preselected in this phase of the project.