1 - 6 of 6
-
PublicationThe Costs of Traffic Accident Hotspots(IEEE, 2019-10)Despite efforts to reduce them, traffic accidents continue to increase and bypass reduction targets. The costs of traffic accidents are enormous, killing 1.35 million people every year and costing 3% of most countries' GDP. Recent research aims to target interventions at high-accident-density locations, called accident hotspots. New methods and technologies can systematically identify hotspots, but it remains unclear whether hotspots contribute to accident costs as well as volume. This paper investigates the monetary and human costs of accident hotspots. We analyze a dataset of all accidents from 2011 - 2017 in Switzerland. We identify hotspots, then analyze their contributions to traffic accident costs. We find that hotspot accidents are not different in monetary costliness or injury rates from non-hotspot accidents, so hotspots drive costs along with accident volume. However, hotspot accidents are less fatal, so hotspot targeting might not be best for fatalities. If hotspots are reduced to normal road conditions, total monetary costs can be reduced by up to 5% per year as a theoretical upper bound. Targeting the top 10% most frequent, costly, injurious, or deadly hotspots yeilds different results for different cost types, with accident number and monetary cost targets creating the highest reductions overall.Type:Journal:Volume:
-
PublicationDriver Identification via the Steering Wheel( 2019-09-09)
-
PublicationBrake Maneuver Prediction–An Inference Leveraging RNN Focus on Sensor Confidence(IEEE, 2019-11-28)In recent years, driver behavior analysis has led to countless driver assistance systems. In these systems, earlier detection of a driver’s maneuver intentions offers opportunities to improve driving experience and safety. Especially brake maneuvers are of fundamental importance because they are directly related to the avoidance of potential hazards.Current state-of-the-art brake assistance systems rely on the release speed of accelerator pedal as an indicator whether a brake event is planned. However, this simple and practical algorithm, fails to capture the overall movement pattern of accelerator pedal behaviors and cannot utilize rich information from different vehicle sensors.To address this issue, we propose a novel recurrent neural network architecture for the purpose of brake maneuver prediction. The proposed method exploits the advantages of multiple sensors. Unlike conventional practices where all signals are aggregated to a single neural network, we leverage the confidence of each sensor. We evaluate our approach based on a dataset of 44 drivers, comprising around 500 hours of naturalistic driving data. The evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm outperforms baseline method by large margin.
Scopus© Citations 9 -
PublicationThe impact of numerical vs. symbolic eco-driving feedback on fuel consumption – A randomized control field trial(Elsevier Science, 2018-12)
Scopus© Citations 26 -
PublicationSpatial prediction of traffic accidents with critical driving events – Insights from a nationwide field study(Elsevier Science, 2018-05)
Scopus© Citations 16 -
PublicationPreventing Traffic Accidents with In-Vehicle Decision Support Systems – The Impact of Accident Hotspot Warnings on Driver Behaviour(Elsevier, 2017-07)Despite continuous investment in road and vehicle safety, as well as improvements in technology standards, the total amount of road traffic accidents has been increasing over the last decades. Consequently, identifying ways of effectively reducing the frequency and severity of traffic accidents is of utmost importance. In light of the depicted challenge, latest studies provide promising evidence that in-vehicle decision support systems (DSSs) can have significant positive effects on driving behaviour and collision avoidance. Going beyond existing research, we developed a comprehensive in-vehicle DSS, which provides accident hotspot warnings to drivers based on location analytics applied to a national historical accident dataset, composed of over 266,000 accidents. As such, we depict the design and field evaluation of an in-vehicle DSS, bridging the gap between real world location analytics and in-vehicle warnings. The system was tested in a country-wide field test of 57 professional drivers, with over 170,000km driven during a four-week period, where vehicle data were gathered via a connected car prototype system. Ultimately, we demonstrate that in-vehicle warnings of accident hotspots have a significant improvement on driver behaviour over time. In addition, we provide first evidence that an individual's personality plays a key role in the effectiveness of in-vehicle DSSs. However, in contrast to existing lab experiments with very promising results, we were unable to find an immediate effect on driver behaviour. Hence, we see a strong need for further field experiments with high resolution car data to confirm that in-vehicle DSSs can deliver in diverse field situations.Type:Journal:Volume:
Scopus© Citations 51
