Closing a great decade, full of innovation, excellence and new knowledge, and several great scientific achievements, we start an even brighter new decade, striving with more dedication, passion and creativity for safe traffic everywhere and for all.
We thank you all for the excellent cooperation, which we aim to further intensify and we are sending you our very best wishes for joyful Christmas holidays and a lucky and joyful new decade, plenty of personal and professional achievements.
NTUA actively contributed with the following presentation: 
Sustainable Urban Mobility in Smart City
The full list of the new mandatory safety features: 
During 30th POLIS Conference on 28 November 2019, in Brussels, Belgium, the Department of Transportation Planning and Engineering of the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA) declared its full support and signed the City declaration “The new Paradigm for Safe City Streets” including 10 principles to be recognized by EU cities, as necessary for sound and effective action for traffic safety.
On November 21, 2019, in Budapest, a Road Safety Experts Workshop was organised by the RADAR project within the framework of Interreg Danube Transnational Programme, titled ITS and other speed management strategies. NTUA actively contributed with the following presentations:
A Diploma Thesis titled “Long-term association of road accidents and weather conditions in European cities” was recently presented by Areti Thanasko. Data on average monthly temperature and precipitation for every city as well as the monthly number of road accidents for the period 1991-2017 was exploited. The application of statistical models revealed that increase of precipitation and temperature results at increase of road accidents. For the group of southern cities, the impact of weather conditions in road accidents is found more severe. For each time period, the rain has a negative impact on accidents, although their correlation is positive. Furthermore, temperature increase due to climate change slows down the improvement of road safety.
A Diploma Thesis titled “The traffic and safety effect of smartphone texting and web surfing during driving in cities using a driving simulator” was recently presented by Maria Oikonomou. Driving profiles of 36 young people were collected through a driving simulator experiment while a survey was conducted to collect the characteristics and driving habits of the participants. A key finding is that web surfing and texting while driving cause: increased accident probability and decreased mean speed and its variation, headway distance and its variation, as well as steering wheel variation. Finally, the use of the Google Maps application has the greatest impact on mean speed variation, while the use of Facebook App while driving has the greatest impact on mean headway distance variation and mean steering wheel variation.
The 1st newsletter of the Horizon 2020 project BE OPEN was recently released highlighting some of the project latest news, the first BE OPEN workshop entitled “Open Science in Transport: Challenges and Way forward“ and key project achievements. The BE OPEN newsletter aims to keep you informed about the project’s progress, news, events and results.
You can also sign up to the BE OPEN newsletter in the following link:
The European Transport Safety Council (ETSC) has published a short video supporting that it is time for the EU to move from dozens of different drink driving limits to one that everyone can remember easily: Zero, despite the fact that every individual responds to alcohol differently.
