Transport and Covid-19: responses and resources

New Directions for Data-Driven Transport Safety

This report explores how seamless data collection, analysis and sharing can unlock innovations in transport safety. Most interventions to improve transport safety are reactions to incidents. Connected vehicles, smartphone apps, ubiquitous sensors, data sharing and machine learning make proactive transport safety interventions possible and prevent crashes before they happen. Drawing on the Safe System approach, this report examines how transport stakeholders can make better decisions by using more relevant and timely data.

Policy Insights

  • Develop standards and platforms for the collection and sharing of safety-critical vehicle data.
  • Ensure privacy in the use of safety-critical data.
  • Refine the applications of surrogate traffic safety metrics.
  • Harness Big Data for road safety but beware of biases.
  • Review training needs for road safety professionals.
  • Empower transport users and workers through mechanisms to report safety concerns.
  • Make safety-critical vehicle data available for telematics applications.
  • Find ways to integrate smartphones into Cooperative-ITS to benefit all users.
  • Improve and link police and hospital data on road crash injuries.
  • Prevent, detect and signal driver distractions.
  • Revise trigger mechanisms for automatic crash notification and event data recording.
  • Share data to enforce limits on driving hours in the gig economy.
  • Favour more accurate and relevant geo-spatial accuracy for safety applications.
  • Update legal frameworks to account for ubiquitous sensing data and their use in improving safety.

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