INNOVATIVE CONCEPTS FOR SMART ROAD RESTRAINT SYSTEMS TO PROVIDE GREATER SAFETY FOR VULNERABLE USERS - SMART RRS

摘要

Worldwide, every year 1.2 million people die in road crashes; 43,000 in Europe alone. This implies a cost to European society of approximately 160 billion euro, making use of 10% of all healthcare resources. Sharp objects such as crash barriers may cause vulnerable road users serious injuries. In recent years a variety of road restraint system designs have been developed to improve the safety of vulnerable road users. SMART RRS is an FP7 SST 2007 RTD1 European collaborative project funded by the EC with the participation of 10 institutions from 5 countries. The project aims to develop a new smart road restraint system that will reduce the number of deaths and injuries caused in road traffic accidents by integrating primary and tertiary sensor systems into it, providing greater protection to all road users, warning motorists and emergency services of danger for prevention purposes and alerting emergency teams of the exact location of accidents as they happen to minimize response time. This new smart restraint system will: Reduce the number of accidents through better information on the actual state of the road and traffic flow (climatic conditions, traffic flow, obstructions, hazards, accidents). Eliminate dangerous profiles from road restraint systems (crash barriers) that currently endanger vulnerable road users. Optimise road safety by providing exact information of where and when accidents happen in real-time. The project has obtained interesting results from an in-depth review of motorcycle accidents, which shows that some of the most aggressive elements for riders are protection systems installed on roadsides. These systems may be continuous, punctual, and rigid or wire rope. It is also learnt that accidents involving roadside protection systems include high speeds and the rider commonly impacts the barrier in an upward position, causing severe injuries. Some of the most important injuries suffered by riders are blunt impacts to the head, member amputation and severe thoracic intrusion. Furthermore, the dynamics of such accidents was researched, providing valuable information on where and how accidents take place and their outcome. Most of the accidents occur on rural roads, where a rider loses control and leaves the road, impacting a roadside obstacle. This impact is generally very severe, as current roadside protection systems are not designed to absorb energy from motorcycle riders but from heavy vehicles instead. The next step was to analyse actual road restraint system evaluation methods in order to present a new and more extensive protocol, which will include simulation and testing phases for both systems and subsystems, with more stringent requirements for the systems.