As part of the AIT Lecture Series, the Mobility Department was pleased to welcome Prof. Pete Thomas on April, 30th, 2015. Pete Thomas is professor of Road and Vehicle Safety at Loughborough University (UK). His guest lecture was dedicated to the subject “the changing face of road safety in the light of the impact new information and automation technologies may have on transport”.
Pete Thomas is head supervisor for Philippe Nitsche’s PhD studies. Philippe Nitsche is a student at the Loughborough University and Scientist at the AIT Mobility Department, business unit Transportation Infrastructure Technologies. The PhD thesis emerged from a collaboration between AIT Mobility and Loughborough University and is devoted to the safety of highly autonomous vehicles and future testing procedures for urban Areas.
Abstract
Road safety policy at national and international level is increasingly based on the Safe System Approach which provides a results focussed framework to deliver road safety and casualty reduction. The Approach relies on a strong evidence base on which national and European road safety policies can be based. Historically this evidence is largely based on analysis of the national accident databases together with measures of effectiveness taken from evaluation studies and the scientific literature.
The European Road Safety Observatory has been established by the European Commission in order to provide a high quality data and knowledge in support of road safety policy-making. Developed under a series of EU research projects led by Loughborough University the ERSO has now become a standard tool for safety decisions. Its further development will focus on synthesising existing and new safety evaluations into a detailed knowledge repository that is focussed on policy support.
The emerging challenge is increasingly to identify the emerging technologies that will have an impact on road safety. Cars are being equipped with new safety systems on a routine basis and the next generation of systems is under development before the previous generation has entered the vehicle fleet. How can we make informed choices over the most effective systems when there is little or no real-world evidence on which to base decisions? What sort of data do we need to inform policy – is traditional accident data sufficient? How does naturalistic driving data contribute to our understanding? Over the longer term how can we be sure that fully automated vehicles will dramatically improve road safety as has been suggested, will taking the human out of the loop prevent all crashes?
CV
Pete Thomas is the Professor of Road and Vehicle Safety at Loughborough University in the UK. He is a specialist in the area of accident and injury causation and has made many contributions to vehicle and road safety. He has published over 150 research papers on a broad range of vehicle safety issues, including active safety systems, injury biomechanics and causation, crash test procedures and accident data Analysis.