The Civil Engineering School of the National Technical University of Athens was ranked 28th among all Civil Engineering Schools worldwide and 7th in Europe. This ranking is produced by the QS Organisation based on the following criteria: Research, Teaching, Employability, Facilities, Internationalization, Innovation, Engagement and Access.  NTUA road safety activities have contributed to this ranking.   

The 6th International Expert Symposium on Accident Research (ESAR) took place in Hanover on 20-21 June 2014. ESAR is organised by the Medical School of Hanover, the University of Technology of Dresden and the Federal Highway Research Institute of Germany and it is a scientific colloquium which can be seen as a platform for exchanges of information on accident research issues. Representatives from authorities as well as from medical and technical institutions came together to discuss new research issues and exchange experiences on accident prevention and methodologies of accident reconstruction. The goal of ESAR was to give the opportunity to all kind of studies on Accident Investigation Methodologies, Accident Analysis, Active and Passive Safety, Injury mechanisms and Injury Prevention to an audience of experts from government, industry and other researchers from all parts of the world.   

The 3rd European Motorcyclists’ Forum was organised by the Federation of European Motorcyclists’ Associations (FEMA) in cooperation with the Motorcycle Industry in Europe (ACEM), hosted by MEP Bernd Lange and took place with great success in the European Parliament in Brussels on 5-6 March 2014. This year’s Forum focused on the question “ITS : Can powered two wheelers benefit from new technologies deployment?” in the context of Horizons 2020 EU research and innovation programme. 

The current state-of-the-art of ITS for transport has not undergone any specific impact assessment with regard to positive or negative consequences for the specific mode of transport on powered two wheels (PTWs). Powered two wheelers, as vulnerable road users, need to be carefully integrated into ITS innovation and deployment policies to guarantee that they also “benefit” from new technologies. All presentations are available at the website of the Forum , together with the respective Forum Memorandum.

The International Road Federation (IRF) released recently the 50th Anniversary Edition of the World Road Statistics (WRS). IRF and Patron Sponsor Michelin produced this special 50th Anniversary Edition of the WRS which includes 12 years of data, providing a comprehensive statistical picture of international road and land transport from the start of the millennium. This report is a source of strategic data on road networks, traffic and inland transport. It contains trends in subject areas like road safety, traffic volumes and vehicle usage and can be used as a benchmark for the performance in key indicators like road expenditure, energy consumption and emissions. 

The Road Safety Unit of DG Move of the European Commission is constantly updating its statistics website, with rich and easy to consult information on the latest trends on road safety in the European Union. Visitors of this website can find updated trends of road fatalities, several detailed road safety maps with specialinteractive tools, charts and figures, as well as several comprehensive basic fact sheets with data on key road safety issues. These data are easily available and very useful for all road safety decision makers and other stakeholders in Europe.    

The Motorcycle Industry in Europe (ACEM) has just released data on power-two-wheelers (PTW) deliveries and registrations, circulating park, production and best sold models in a panel of European countries (data available as of January 2013). These tables and figures highlight the significant decrease in new PTW vehicles in most European countries since the beginning of the economic crisis. 

A paper titled ‘Assessment of exposure proxies for macroscopic road safety prediction‘ co-authored by Costas Antoniou and George Yannis is now published in Transportation Research Record. The objective of this research is to investigate the suitability of alternative proxy variables for macroscopic road safety modeling, using three suitable exposure proxies: (i) number of vehicles in circulation, (ii) GDP and (iii) fuel consumption. Severalstructural time-series models have been developed for each proxy for two Mediterranean countries with many similar socio-economic characteristics: Greece and Cyprus. Based on the findings of this analysis, a number of observations can be drawn. Proxy variables can provide reasonable results, when exposure data are not available. Furthermore, even in two countries with many similarities the selected proxy measure differs. This suggests that the underlying conditions that make a variable a suitable proxy for exposure is complex and needs further investigation.  

The RIDERSCAN project is a EU co-funded project, coordinated by the Federation of European Motorcyclists’ Associations (FEMA), aiming to gather existing information on motorcycle safety in Europe, to identify needs for action and to create a crossborder knowledge-based network.  NTUA contributes to the various actions of the RIDERSCAN project as an activity partner. RIDERSCAN launched the 3rd and last survey targeting European motorcyclists. With the objective to draw a European map of rider awareness and acceptance of new technologies applied to the transport systems, the survey is asking riders to evaluate willingness to test, use, and buy systems, which are, for a wide majority of them, far from being introduced in the market. Motorcycle riders and stakeholders are invited to fill in this on-line survey, (in less than 15 minutes), available in several European languages: English  and Greek .  

An event on “Child and Road Safety” is organised by the Ministry of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks under the Greek Presidency, which will take place on 5 March 2014, in Athens, at the Ministry Auditorium, on the occasion of the official release of children’s road safety educational book ‘My friend the bike’ and children’s song ‘Mind-Warning’.   

The World Health Organisation (WHO) has launched a new tool to support development of strong road safety campaigns. This new resource for Governments and civil society organizations, is a part of the Bloomberg Philanthropies Global Road Safety Programme. The library, which contains some of the world’s most impactful road safety video and audio campaigns, is intended as inspiration for those planning to produce their own campaigns by offering a range of creative ideas and concepts. The library is searchable by topic (drinking and driving, motorcycle helmets, and seat-belts, language, etc) or WHO region (currently includes around 60 campaigns). 

A Diploma Thesis titled ‘Comparative analysis of young drivers’ behaviour in normal and simulated conditions in interurban road‘ was presented by Marios Nikas in January 2014. This Diploma Thesis aims to compare the behavior of young drivers in normal and simulated driving conditions. Data were collected through an experimental process on a driving simulator but also on real traffic conditions, in which all the participants drove in both cases the same driving scenarios. Lognormal regression methods were developed for the identification of the impact of driving environment (simulated and real traffic conditions), basic driver characteristics (mileage, age, gender), as well as the driving style (average acceleration, deceleration and standard deviations of them) to the average vehicle speed change. Through model implementation, it was revealed that absolute values of drivers’ traffic performance vary between simulated and real driving conditions. On the contrary, relative differences of driver behaviour at the two driving environments remain mostly the same. More precisely, speed difference between fast and slow drivers is the same at the two driving environments, as is also speed difference the same at the two driving environments between drivers talking and not talking to the co-driver. 

A Diploma Thesis titled ‘Critical Factors of motorcycle accidents in Greece‘ was presented by Evita Alevizou in January 2014. For this thesis, appropriately processed data were used from the database of the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) and loglinear  regression models were developed. The application of these models led to the investigation of the influence of several parameters, such as region type, age, lighting, accident type etc on the number of fatalities and injuries. It appears that the number of vehicles involved in the accident is the most important factor of the fatalities model, while the accident type affects more the serious and slight injuries. This influence is greater on motorcycles than passenger cars. 

A Diploma Thesis titled ‘Comparative analysis of factors affecting driving under the influence of alcohol of car drivers and motorcyclists‘ was presented by Dimitra Arvaniti in January 2014. The aim of this diploma thesis is to examine the factors affecting driving under the influence of alcohol of car drivers and motorcycles. To achieve this goal, the responses of a representative sample of Greek drivers of cars and motorcycles are examined from thepan-European research SARTRE 4 and are analyzed by the development of logistic regression models. The application of the models revealed that the factors affecting driving under the influence of alcohol are six for car drivers and seven for motorcyclists, four of which are common. The common parameters are: age, their opinion on whether most of their friends would be driving under the influence of alcohol, their opinion on whether a person is capable of driving carefully in case of consumption alcohol and their education level. Additional factors for car drivers are their view on the legal limit of alcohol consumption and their gender, and for motorcyclists it is their view on how dangerous driving under the influence of drugs is. 

A Diploma Thesis titled ‘Investigation of the impact on road safety of increasing the speed limit on motorways‘ was presented by Eleni Georgiadou in January 2014. The objective of this Diploma Thesis is to investigate the impact on road safety of increasing the speed limit on motorways from 120 to 130 km/h in June 2007. In order to achieve this objective, data was collected concerning road accidents on motorway sections Athens – Thebes and Athens – Tripoli from the database of Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering of the N.T.U.A. with data from the Hellenic Statistical Authority and on sections of the Egnatia Motorway from Egnatia Odos S.A. for the period 2005 – 2010. The application of the methodology indicates a statistically significant increase in the number of deaths in the section Athens – Thebes a year after raising the speed limit, possibly due to the increase of the speed limit, and then ceases to be statistically significant, probably due to improvements made to the infrastructure. In the section Athens – Tripoli a reduction in accidents and victims is indicated probably due to improvements in the infrastructure while in the Egnatia Motorway there is no statistically significant change possibly due to the high geometrical characteristics of the road which might satisfy the higher speed limit. 

The International Transport Forum’s Cycling Safety Working Group has recently released a Research Report on Cycling, Health and Safety. This report monitors international trends in cycling, safety and policy, and explores options that may help decision makers design safe environments for cycling. Key messages relate tostrategic goal-setting for cycling policy and managing crash risks while increasing health benefits. The report also discusses how to better capture crash and bicycle usage statistics. The safety impacts of a wide range of pro-cycling measures are examined in detail. 

NTUA Assistant Professor Constantinos Antoniou and Associate Professor George Yannis have been awarded with the annual outstanding paper award of the Transportation Research Board Committee ANB20 (Safety Data, Analysis and Evaluation) 2013. The paper awarded concerned the “Assessment of exposure proxies for macroscopic road safety prediction“, published at the Proceedings of the 92nd Annual Meeting of the Transportation Research Board, Washington, January 2013. The objective of this research was to investigate alternative proxy variables (vehicle fleet, GDP, fuel consumption) in macroscopic structural road safety time-series modelling. 

The Transportation Research Board (TRB) 93rd Annual Meeting was held in Washington, D.C., in January 2014, with more than 5.500 presentations in more than 800 scientific sessions and workshops and more than 12.000 transportation experts and stakeholders. The spotlight theme for the 2014 TRB Annual Meeting is Celebrating Our Legacy, Anticipating Our Future.

NTUA road safety presentations concerned:

  Results from a driving simulator study on performance of drivers with cerebral diseases in rural roads

  Sign recall in a fixed-base simulator as a measure of fitness-to-drive

 European Road Safety Forecasts

 Relationship between road safety and economic indicators

ETSC has recently published the Memorandum to the Greek Presidency of the Council of the European Union titled ‘Road safety priorities for the EU in 2014’. In this Memorandum, ETSC outlines its recommendations on the key EU road safety policy dossiers to be steered by the Greek presidency of the European Union in the first half of 2014. These include securing agreements on EU legislation on automated in-vehicle emergency calling (eCall) and safer lorry design. The main recent and forthcoming policy initiatives from the European Commission including progress on in-vehicle safety technologies such as Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) for professional vehicles and alcohol interlocks for certain vehicle and driver categories, are also included, with recommendations for maximising the results for road safety. The final part of this Memorandum focuses on Greece’s own track record on road safety with recommendations for improvement. 

The Directorate General for Mobility and Transport (DG Move) of the European Commission released the Statistical Pocketbook 2013 ‘EU Transport in figures‘. In this Statistical Pocketbook, key road safety Tables are contained, together with several other Tables on transport statistics, providing a complete picture of current trends in transport in Europe. Data on road fatalities for the EU member states and associate countries allow for time series comparisons and country rankings. 

The European Union Road Federation (ERF) has launched a Position Paper that makes the case for a more widespread use of road markings on Europe’s roads as a means of increasing road safety and reducing the socio-economic impact of accidents. Road markings are one of the most cost-effective safety solutions that are available to policymakers and road owners. They provide drivers with much needed guidance on the road, allow for better preview time and can significantly help avert the risks of run-off accidents and head-collisions. This paper is calling on Member States to establish intervention and maintenance policies to guarantee that road markings on Europe’s road remain visible for first and foremost for road users and at same time, optimise the interaction between the road infrastructure and the intelligent car. 

The Road Safety Institute (R.S.I.) “Panos Mylonas” created a pleasant area in the city center of Athens (Stoa Bibliou, 5 Pesmazoglou Str.), in order to better inform citizens on road safety issues. The Road Safety Information Center (R.S.IC.) was established thanks to the support of Philekpaideutiki Etaireia (Society for the Promotion of Education and Learning) and the Safer Roads Foundation, while the referral Centers for Road Safety (NEST’s) have been developed through the EU funded AVENUE project. 

The European Road Safety Observatory (ERSO) of the European Commission as developed by the EC co-funded research projectsSafetyNet and Dacota has been awarded the prestigious Prince Michael International Road Safety Award 2013 as recognition for its contribution to making widely available for the first time in Europe a wealth of road safety data and knowledge to support evidence based decision making. Since its opening in 2006, ERSO has attracted millions of visitors seeking the most recent and appropriate data and knowledge covering a wide range of road safety contemporary issues. NTUA participated actively at all phases of the development of the European Road Safety Observatory. 

A paper titled ‘Detecting Powered-Two-Wheeler Incidents from High Resolution Naturalistic Data‘ co-authored by Eleni Vlahogianni, George Yannis and John Golias is now published in Transportation Research Part F: Traffic Psychology and Behaviour. During risky conditions, Powered-Two-Wheeler (PTW) drivers often alter their behavior from a regular driving pattern to an irregular chain of driving actions by braking, changing the throttle pressure, maneuvering and so on, or combinations of the above. However, both the actual and perceived thresholds of regular and irregular driving behavior differ among PTW drivers. A simple and flexible methodology is proposed in order to define PTW driving profiles by distinguishing between regular and irregular PTW driving behaviors using high resolution naturalistic data. “Irregularities” in driving behavior are consistently expressed as outlying values in the dataset of driving parameters. The detected irregularities are those that diverge from the centroid of the jointly considered driving parameters. These irregularities may be considered to define critical driving situations (incidents) that are further associated to typical driving events. Results indicate that the joint consideration ofvariables which are directly connected to the mechanical characteristics of PTW, such as front and rear brake activation, wheel speed, throttle and steering, are adequate to distinguish the regular from irregular PTW driving behavior.  

Global Road Safety Partnership launched its new publication “Advocating for Road Safety: A Guidance Manual for National Societies“. The purpose of this document is to guide Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies through the process of planning and implementing a road safety advocacy initiative. The document outlines the role advocacy plays in improving road safety, and highlights the added value of Red Cross Red Crescent National Societies’ involvement in road safety advocacy. Moreover, it defines the steps required to design and implement an advocacy initiativearound a road safety issue and provides examples, resources and tools to support National Societies throughout the design process. 

The Hellenic Ministry of Infrastructure, Transport and Networks, as a part of the effort to reduce road accidents in Greece, emerges as a top priority the Road Safety Education Development. Particular emphasis is given on informing and educating children about road safety and traffic behaviour and prepare them to become responsible future drivers. For this reason, a series of electronic traffic education books for students of Primary and Secondary Schools, prepared by CERTH/HIT and with the contribution of NTUA, are now availble online. 

A paper titled ‘Effect of GDP changes on road traffic fatalities‘ co-authored by George Yannis, Eleonora Papadimitriou and Katerina Folla is now published in the Journal of Safety Science. This research aims to associate annual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) changes with the related annual changes in road traffic mortality rates. Mortality rates and GDP per capita data for the period 1975–2011 are used from 27 European countries, for the development of mixed linear models. The results suggest that an annual increase of GDP per capita leads to an annual increase of mortality rates, whereas an annual decrease of GDP per capita leads to an annual decrease of mortality rates. These effects are statistically significant overall, and in different groups of countries (Northern/Western, Central/Eastern and Southern). A one-year lagged effect of annual GDP decrease was found to be significant in Northern/Western countries.  

A Workshop on Education and Road Safety was organised by the Hellenic Institute of Transportation Engineers in Athens on 27 November 2013. Several aspects and initiatives of road safety education were highlighted with the the active participation of road safety decision makers, experts and practicioners from Greece. 

All the workshop presentations are now available. 

NTUA Research Associate Dr. Sophia Vardaki presented the education at the national road safety strategic plan. 

The 15th European Transport Safety Lecture was organised by the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) together with its three founding members – the German Road Safety Council, the Dutch Safety Board and the British Parliamentary Advisory Council for Transport Safety and took place with great success on November 21st, 2013 in Berlin. Prof. Dietmar Otte from the Medical University of Hannover gave the Lecture on Road Safety: Reliable Data – Effective Policies, having attracted a large audience of more than 150 national and international road safety practitioners, technical specialists and decision makers. Response to the Lecture was given by European Commission Head of Road Safety Unit Mr. Szabolcs Schmidt and TU Delft Professor Fred Wegman. At the lecture and the vivid discussion followed there was focus to the need forreliable and accurate data to be placed at the core of road safety policies, serving to identify problems, risk factors, and priority areas as well as to formulate strategies, setting targets and monitor performance. 

This ETSC Lecture coincided with the celebration of 20 years of ETSC. On the occasion, ETSC Chairman Herman De Croo stated that “ETSC has marked 20 years of concerted advocacy efforts on road safety throughout Europe, acting as an established source of independent and impartial advice to policy and decision-makers in Europe”.