Safe and shared mobility services for improving user well-being and clean urban environments

LL#3 in a nutshell

SOTERIA’s Living Lab #3 will take place in Madrid, Spain. LL#3 will demonstrate the SOTERIA advanced accident analysis and safety intelligence services in Madrid, a large capital with a population of over 3 million people. In May 2023, in parallel with the rest of SOTERIA’s Living Labs, a series of workshops and surveys will be launched across the identified stakeholders in Madrid in order to raise awareness of the LL#3 within the local community.

Motivation | Data-based tools for informed policy making towards VRUs’ safety

In the last years, micromobility, now boosted by the irruption of shared mobility services and the facilities of e-vehicles (scooters, skateboards, bikes, etc.), has gained popularity as a sustainable alternative to private cars. However, these forms of mobility are not always seen as valuable from all road users. From the safety point of view, they have some detractors. Urban mobility planners have adopted various positions to regulate the services and ensure the safety of the road users, ranging from creating segregated lanes for these vehicles to the total banning of the operation of e-scooters. Policy makers have faced dissensus about the appropriate measures even within each group of road users. For instance, while some cyclists defend the existence of segregated bike lanes to increase their safety by keeping them away from cars, others claim that these lead to a higher number of fatalities due to reduction of visibility in junctions, among other arguments. Data scarcity about the number and severity of accidents and the external factors leading to these make it difficult to assess the efficiency of different measures and interventions.

Access to new mobility data sources (e.g., mobile network data, operation data from shared mobility services, data from connected vehicles, etc.) open new opportunities for the rigorous analysis of urban safety of the different road users. The reconstruction of routes and flows of road users as well as the identification of incidents, not recorded in official statistics (e.g., separation losses between vehicles, sudden braking, etc.) enabled by the new data sources make it possible to identify users related or external factors (e.g., speed limit, excess of traffic, road layout, etc.) linked with a higher probability of accidents as well as the more vulnerable areas of the city. New data analysis and artificial intelligence techniques can be applied to exploit these data sources.

Madrid LL

The city of Madrid hosts a large offer of micromobility services. In 2021 the Governing Board of the Madrid City Council has approved a new Road Safety Plan that to be applied between 2021 and 2030. The city has a strategic objective to move towards safe mobility, with zero tolerance for accidents, and promote road safety habits that allow safe travel. The plan contemplates the expansion of the current network of bike lanes, reduction of speed limits of various road and the pedestrianisation of some streets.

The Madrid LL aims at leveraging on the availability of data from heterogenous data sources (mobile network data, connected vehicles, bike and scooter sharing traces) to identify accident hot spots and taking advantage of the implementation of the different measures to perform a systematic analysis of the impact of these. With the knowledge gained from this spatial analysis, the LL will develop tools for analysis and prediction of road safety incidents in urban environments. These models will be used, when possible, to simulate the impact of alternative infrastructure and regulations to support road safety decision-making processes in the city of Madrid.

Goals

The Living Lab will focus on the challenges that the implementation of micro-mobility services entails for ensuring road safety for VRUs, including ageing population, and will allow the city of Madrid to:

• Evaluate road safety risks in selected areas of the inner city. The evaluation will be based on a combination of data sources including shared mobility operation data, connected vehicles data and mobile network data.
• Improve city infrastructure and regulations to increase safety for all road users. The interventions will be selected together with relevant stakeholders, including local authorities and VRU associations.
• Predict dangerous events though the identification and mapping of near collision events and the classification of city areas according to the risks for VRUs.

Partners

SOTERIA’s Living Lab #3 is organised by Nommon and supported by the University of Deusto and Vianova.