Better ITS use could improve road safety

Intelligent transport systems (ITS) could be better used to improve road safety.

That’s the view of Ministry of Transport safety and mobility principal adviser Iain McGlinchy.

He told the ITS NZ “T-Tech” conference in Auckland that some people in the road safety community are “not so convinced” about the benefits of new technology such as ITS.

“Few road safety strategies have ITS as a major component.”

McGlinchy says many parts of the world are seeing road deaths rising recently despite decades of improvement.

Measures such as air bags may have contributed to improved survival, but crash rates have barely dropped, he says.

Technology could help turn the tide, he believes.

A vehicle standards inventory includes a 47-page list of significant vehicle technologies and production standards. These include electronic stability control (ESC) and anti-lock braking (ABS) – both for heavy vehicles with motorcycles included in the latter, and auto emergency braking (AEB) for all vehicles except motorcycles, McGlinchy says.

Increased safety features also soon need to be met for the European new car assessment programme (Euro NCAP) to gain a top five-star rating. These include driver monitoring, AEB and autonomous emergency steering.

McGlinchy says standards likely to be introduced by 2020 may also require vehicle-to-vehicle data exchange and vehicle to infrastructure communication.

“We want people to buy into the new technology,” McGlinchy says. “We need real-world data to show it works.”

He says informed discussion is required around ITS and road safety.

While some might point to aging fleets (New Zealand’s average is 14 years old, the USA 12 years and half of the 28 European Union countries have fleet ages older than 12) as contributing to road safety issues, McGlinchy says that’s not necessarily the case.

“New vehicles travel more, and the older the vehicle the less it travels.”

By the time a car is nearing 20 years of age it is only doing about 8000km annually, McGlinchy says.

“Travel declines, so we need to focus on new vehicles which are doing higher annual kilometres.”

McGlinchy says the age of the European fleets has not stopped them from delivering ITS solutions.