Enhanced Safety of Cyclists in Smart Cities
There is a rise in the number of cyclists in urban areas in a time where municipalities are striving to improve the quality of life, by promoting walking and biking habits. However, the results obtained over the past years are not all positive for cyclist safety.
According to Stat Canada, Health Reports: Cycling in Canada from the year 1994 through 2012, 1408 cyclists have died in crashes, with an average of 74 each year.
In the U.S, 840 cyclists were killed in 2016, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Association (NHTSA). Across the United States, cyclist fatalities have increased by 11 535 mortalities from 2010 to 2017. More cyclists are being killed because of the roads, that are still dominated by fast-moving vehicles.
These deaths are caused by human error and failing to respect the highway safety code. A recent study conducted by the University of Toronto Engineering researchers has studied the human eye movements of drivers at busy intersections and found that drivers fail to do proper safety checks for people biking and walking.
The researchers have also found out that, 11 out of the 19 drivers who have participated in the test failed to double look at areas where cyclists or pedestrians would be located, before turning. To add, most of the failures were caused when turning into major streets, due to parked vehicles that have blocked the driver’s view of the bike lane.
Although, researchers are working to advance smart cities that will improve the state of living and the efficacy of transportation. Some manufacturers have also started to provide safer vehicles, such as Google’s self-driving cars. The self-driving vehicles are meant to be more reliable and more efficient when compared to conventional vehicles.
However, self-driving cars are more focused on the driver’s safety, rather than that of pedestrians and cyclists. The challenge for self-driving vehicles resides in understanding and mastering the behaviour of pedestrians and cyclists.
According to cyclist.co.uk, a study done by Stanford University discovered that Tesla’s Model S has regularly failed to positively identify cyclists that are cycling around the city’s streets. They have also shown that autonomous cars might be reckless for a pedestrian and fatal to a cyclist, as they have a lot less recognition in the system.
To succeed in protecting cyclists and pedestrians and eliminate fatalities considering new technologies, developers must consider the pedestrians and cyclist’s perspective rather than the driver’s perspective. !important is working on a crowd safety model by understanding the cyclist’s routes and behaviour to help ensure safe interactions between cyclists and autonomous vehicles. Their model will solve P2X (Pedestrian to everything) and P2V (Pedestrian to vehicles) solutions for the automotive industries.
Researchers have faced several challenges and have concluded that replicating the functions of human intelligence is more challenging than they thought when considering safety from the car’s perspective. The unpredictable and complexity of self-driving cars have also made it a challenge to regulate, as there still are no proper rules to define who will be held to account and to avoid the trolley issues.
To improve the conditions of the roads and before self-driving cars share the streets with pedestrians and cyclists, automotive cars got not just to detect their presence but to predict their movements and behaviours before causing fatal outcomes.
