Increasing road safety is still a major worldwide challenge. Though road safety in the EU has improved in the last decades, still more than 25.000 people have lost their lives on EU roads in 2017 [1]. Harsh driving remains one of the major causes of accidents [2]. Hence, making areas of harsh driving visible to people can be a useful tool for various stakeholders to develop strategies for road safety improvement.
The overall goal of the Automotive Demonstrator V3 – Regional Driving Risk Estimator is hence to aggregate all driving safety-reducing events detected within the trips of individual drivers and then visualise them on a geographic map to provide an estimation of a regional driving risk.
The safe driving indicator (Automotive Demonstrator V2 [3]) has already quantified all individual driving risks per trip and driver. To increase the value of this information for various stakeholders, the Automotive Demonstrator V3 aggregates all individual driving risks into a regional driving risk. Thereby the regional driving risk is visualised as a heatmap overlay on a geographic map of the respective region to provide decision-relevant information.
Again, this demonstrator is very useful for insurance companies that want to better assess the driving risk within certain regions in order to adapt the policies of new customers living in that region according to a higher or lower driving risk. In addition, this demonstrator is valuable for road operators to better assess driving risks and who may suggest speed limits or other measures to make driving safer. Finally, this demonstrator is useful for city planners and traffic planners to better assess driving risks in cities and implement measures.
The figure below shows the output of the regional driving risk estimator for the districts St. Peter and Liebenau in the city of Graz. Thereby, it becomes visible that especially crossings are dangerous hotspots, where aggressive driving behaviour was conducted.
[1] Annual Accident Report 2018, https://ec.europa.eu/transport/road_safety/sites/roadsafety/files/pdf/statistics/dacota/asr2018.pdf
[2] Why monitor harsh braking and acceleration, https://www.verizonconnect.com/resources/article/harsh-braking-acceleration-why-monitor/
[3] Automotive Demonstrator V2 – safe driving indicator: https://www.aegis-bigdata.eu/automotive-demonstrator-v2-safe-driving-indicator/