Walking and Cycling
Safety Management Systems
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
21 December 2018
- Management commitment to establishing safety policies and objectives
- Inclusion of explicit safety (non-punitive) reporting procedures
- Safety performance monitoring and measurement
- Identification of accountable management employees
- Appointment of key safety personnel responsible for safety oversight and promotion
- Implementation of a risk management process to identify hazards and associated risks
- Safety training at management and employee levels
Safer City Streets: Global Benchmarking for Urban Road Safety
Research Report, Policy Insights,
20 November 2018
- Develop mobility observatories in cities.
- Collect traffic casualty data from hospitals, not only from police records.
- Adopt ambitious targets to reduce the number of casualties.
- Focus on protecting vulnerable road users.
- Use appropriate indicators to measure the safety of vulnerable road users in cities.
- Estimate daytime population to improve the comparability of traffic safety statistics.
- Prioritise research on urban road crashes.
The Social Impacts of Road Pricing
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
10 October 2018
- Make demand management and congestion reduction the primary objective of road pricing.
- Differentiate road pricing by location and time.
- Combine road pricing and public transport planning to improve efficiency.
- Examine the combined effects of scheme design and mitigation to understand distributional impacts.
- Consider the use of discounts and exemptions carefully.
- Develop road pricing as part of an intervention package to achieve better utilisation of urban space.
- Reconcile economic, practical and political aspects in the design of road pricing schemes.
- Differentiate charges and consider adopting a rules-based pricing approach.
Shared Mobility Simulations for Dublin
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
9 October 2018
- Consider integrating Shared Mobility services into the Greater Dublin Area transport system.
- Shared mobility services should be provided on a large-enough scale to reap full benefits.
- Use shared services as a feeder service for high-capacity public transport and the existing bus network.
- Use alternative fuels for shared mobility fleet to reduce emissions further.
- Target potential early adopters for Shared Mobility services in order to achieve scale of service.
- Set the regulatory framework for shared mobility services to generate maximum societal benefit.
Information Sharing for Efficient Maritime Logistics
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
25 September 2018
- Support the emergence of open standards in maritime logistics.
- Ensure interoperability between public and private systems for the exchange of logistics information.
- Support ports in creating co-ordination platforms and Single Windows.
- Ensure that digitalisation in the maritime logistics chain occurs in a competitive environment.
- Closely monitor cyber security vulnerabilities in maritime logistics.
Safer Roads with Automated Vehicles?
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
22 May 2018
- Reinforce the Safe System approach to ensure automated vehicles are used safely.
- Apply Vision Zero thinking to automated driving.
- Avoid safety performance being used to market competing automated vehicles.
- Carefully assess the safety impacts of systems that share driving tasks between humans and machines.
- Require reporting of safety-relevant data from automated vehicles.
- Develop and use a staged testing regime for automated vehicles.
- Establish comprehensive cybersecurity principles for automated driving.
- Ensure the functional isolation of safety-critical systems and that connectivity does not compromise cybersecurity or safety.
- Provide clear and targeted messaging of vehicle capabilities.
Defining, Measuring and Improving Air Connectivity
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
16 May 2018
- Adapt the use of connectivity metrics to specific policy challenges.
- Use a combination of approaches to assess potential knock-on effects that policy or strategy changes may have on air connectivity.
- Involve all aviation stakeholders in the policy process of developing air connectivity metrics.
- Make systematic use of air connectivity metrics to evaluate the performance of the national aviation sector and improve decision-making.
Blockchain and Beyond: Encoding 21st Century Transport
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
16 May 2018
- Public authorities must prepare for a much more networked and meshed world.
- Take into account changes in data science and technology when developing Mobility as a Service.
- Look beyond initial cryptocurrency applications of distributed ledger technologies.
- Governments should help deploy the building blocks that enable wider uptake of distributed ledgers.
- Apply blockchain technology now for slow and (relatively) small transport use cases; anticipate next generation distributed ledger technologies for “big and fast” applications to be deployed later.
- Governments should develop algorithmic code-based regulation to accompany the uptake of distributed ledger technologies.
Cooperative Mobility Systems and Automated Driving
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
2 May 2018
- Shared mobility is still a relatively new field but is progressing rapidly. With business models and preferred technologies still in flux, policy makers need to prepare considered responses to these developments without delay.
- Service concepts and technology currently and on the brink of being explored need to consider a range of design domain restrictions, dependencies on infrastructure, operating principles and user interfaces.
- Specific service concepts should be matched to specific operational environments, on a detailed local level as well as across continents and cultures.
- Government action will affect how automated vehicles will impact society. Existing approaches will not be appropriate for long. Their understanding and input will help to balance the debate on whether AVs can indeed alleviate a series of stubborn problems.
Integrating Urban Public Transport Systems and Cycling
Roundtable Report, Policy Insights,
25 April 2018
- Design interchange stations to provide secure, uncongested conditions for transfer by the shortest routes possible.
- Provide adequate bike parking areas at stations and stops.
- Integrate ticketing and information systems as well as the physical transport infrastructure.
- Establish integrated urban transport plans in consultation with stakeholders and the public.
Speed and Crash Risk
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
28 March 2018
- Reduce the speed on roads as well as speed differences between vehicles.
- Set speed limits according to Safe System principles.
- Improve infrastructure and enforcement if speed limits are to be increased.
- Use automatic speed control to reduce speed effectively.
Alcohol-Related Road Casualties in Official Crash Statistics
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
6 February 2018
- Review how data on alcohol-related road crashes is collected.
- Aim for a systematic alcohol testing of every road user actively involved in a serious crash.
- Use statistical analysis methods to better estimate the number of alcohol-related road fatalities.
- Harmonise definitions of alcohol-related road casualties.
- Conduct future research on how to measure alcohol-related road crashes involving pedestrians and cyclists.
Improving Safety for Motorcycle, Scooter and Moped Riders
Research Report, Policy Insights,
7 October 2015
- The powered two-wheeler population is increasing and plays a significant role in mobility.
- Powered two-wheeler (PTW) riders are at far greater risk than car drivers.
- Poor perception and control are frequent failures that lead to PTW crashes.
- A Safe System approach is required to improve the safety of PTWs.
- The helmet is the most important source of protection against severe injuries and death.
- Advances in car technology can also bring positive safety benefits to PTW users. There are a number of new technologies, such as forward collision warning, blind spot information and vulnerable road user protection systems, which can prevent collisions, including those with PTW riders, pedestrians and cyclists.
Road Infrastructure Safety Management
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
6 October 2015
- Benchmark road infrastructure against good practices in other countries.
- Implement new minimum safety standards for road infrastructure.
- Continue evaluation and research to quantify safety impacts of planning decisions.
- Implement suitable Road Infrastructure Safety Management procedures for each stage of road development including planning design, pre-opening and full operation.
- Make Road Infrastructure Safety Management procedures legally binding.
- Involve both road and health authorities when developing road accident data bases.
- Assure adequate institutional management capacity and investment levels.
- Use existing tools and guidelines; adopt second-best solutions where state-of-the-art solutions are not feasible.
- Identify the Road Safety Infrastructure Management procedures that fit specific needs and understand barriers to implementation.
- Share good practices of Road infrastructure Safety Management procedures and intervention measures.
- Monitor the safety performance of road infrastructure.
- Develop self-explaining roads.
Why Does Road Safety Improve When Economic Times Are Hard?
IRTAD, Policy Insights,
5 October 2015
- There is clear evidence that when economic growth declines, and particularly when unemployment increases, road safety improves.
- The financial and economic crises which started in 2007 were accompanied by marked falls in annual numbers of road deaths in most OECD countries.
- It is important to understand how much of the accelerated reduction in numbers of deaths during the downturn that began in 2008 was attributable to the changed economic conditions.
- The economic downturn in 2009-10 may well have contributed to about two-thirds of the decrease in fatalities from 2008.
- The recent downturn has had repercussions on the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and unemployment rate and has influenced the number of road deaths through a reduction in vehicle kilometres driven, especially by young men and by heavy goods vehicles, a reduction in speeding and in drink-driving, and a reduction in learning to drive by young men.
- Policy makers need to take careful account of these results when setting road safety targets and when designing road safety strategies for the future.
The Impact of Mega-Ships
Case-Specific Policy Analysis, Policy Insights,
30 April 2015
- Cost savings from bigger container ships are decreasing.
- The transport costs due to larger ships could be substantial.
- Supply chain risks related to mega-container ships are rising.
- Public policies need to better take account of this and act accordingly.
- Further increase of maximum container ship size would raise ransport costs.
Big Data and Transport
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
30 April 2015
- Road safety improvements can be accelerated through the specification and harmonisation of a limited set of safety-related vehicle data elements.
- Transport authorities will need to audit the data they use in order to understand what it says (and what it does not say) and how it can best be used.
- More effective protection of location data will have to be designed upfront into technologies, algorithms and processes.
- New models of public-private partnership involving data-sharing may be necessary to leverage all the benefits of Big Data.
- Data visualisation will play an increasingly important role in policy dialogue.
Automated and Autonomous Driving
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
30 April 2015
- Automated driving comprises a diverse set of emerging concepts that must be understood individually and as part of broader trends toward automation and connectivity
- Uncertainty on market deployment strategies and pathways to automation complicates the regulatory task
- Incrementally shifting the driving task from humans to machines will require changes in insurance
- The shift from human to machine may have an impact on what product information developers and manufacturers of autonomous vehicles share, and with whom
- Regulators and developers should actively plan to minimise legacy risks
Urban Mobility System Upgrade
Corporate Partnership Board Report, Policy Insights,
31 March 2015
- Self-driving vehicles could change public transport as we currently know it.
- The potential impact of self-driving shared fleets on urban mobility is significant. It will be shaped by policy choices and deployment options.
- Active management is needed to lock in the benefits of freed space.
- Improvements in road safety are almost certain. Environmental benefits will depend on vehicle technology.
- New vehicle types and business models will be required.
- Public transport, taxi operations and urban transport governance will have to adapt.
- Mixing fleets of shared self-driving vehicles and privately-owned cars will not deliver the same benefits as a full TaxiBot/AutoVot fleet - but it still remains attractive.