IRF Addresses ARMFA’s 20th General Assembly in Mozambique
While Africa has an estimated total road network of 2.9 millions km, only 30% are surfaced roads, of which a third are located in the SADC region. If we add to this the inefficiencies and bottlenecks of the transport system, the artificial barriers and high cross-border tariffs, the economic growth and regional integration become even harder to achieve.
To address these issues, the African Road Maintenance Fund Association (ARMFA) held its 20th General Assembly on 3-6 April 2023 in Maputo, Mozambique under the theme “Aligning Sustainable Financing to the Needs of the Road Sector in Africa”. The meeting was opened by Mozambique’s President, Filipe Jacinto Nyusi, IRF Director General, Susanna Zammataro and other members representing the association’s 35 African country member states as well as international guests.
The meeting provided an exchange space to discuss the current challenges road fund entities and the sector are facing and called for innovative thinking in order to develop new measures that will help look at the future with more confidence and effectiveness in the field of funding. A key message that was brought up throughout the meeting was the importance of increasing collaboration between the government, public and private entities and other development partners.
To this effect, IRF Director General, Susanna Zammataro - speaking on “Sustainable Funding Towards Roads’ Preservation – referred to the new partnership “Roads4People Fund” with ORIS and UNIDO. Aiming at sustaining investments in rural roads, the programme leverages on technology and savings digitalisation generates to sustain rural roads development and upgrades.
Read more on ARMFA GA here.
Moving Towards Equity: Women Experts Discuss Gender-Inclusive Transportation Planning
In celebration of International Women’s Day, IBTTA’s Women in Tolling Council hosted a discussion on 8 March 2023 on the impact of transportation on women across the world. More specifically, the webinar focused on the investments and policies directed at providing and ensuring equity in transportation for women, and on reviewing the current state of equity in this area for women both in the US and internationally.
The panel was composed of women experts in the fields of transportation and equity, including IRF Director General, Susanna Zammataro, Diana Mendes (AICP Corporate President and Director of Equity in Transportation) and moderator Joi Dean (Executive Director, Richmond Metropolitan Transportation Authority).
Ms Zammataro stressed the role that data plays in creating equitable transportation solutions and its importance in order to get out of stereotyped and generic conversations. Data helps us identify the specific challenges that women face to access transport (including their safety) and their different mobility patterns. It helps identify trends and patterns, and evaluate the effectiveness of potential solutions. Without data, policies and solutions can be based on assumptions, personal opinions, or anecdotal evidence, which can lead to ineffective outcomes.
The panel discussed the different transportation planning, policy and management approaches that are currently used to address equity, and their barriers. It addressed the challenges that the implementation of these policies face nowadays, such as the lack of understanding and cultural bias; the slow pace of change and the lack of clear guidance. To this effect, it was stressed that it’s critical to share knowledge around positive examples and various tools that do exist and can help. Reference was made to the ITF Gender Analysis Toolkit for Transport, a hands-on, easy-to-use method for incorporating a gender-inclusive perspective into transport projects, plans and policies.
Ms Zammataro also announced the imminent release of a new piece of work from the Sustainable Mobility for All (SuM4All) working group on gender titled “Working Women in Transport: A Toolkit for Change”. The report will be launched end of May in Leipzig, in conjunction with the ITF Annual Summit.
Recording of the webinar is accessible here: https://www.ibtta.org/content/ensuring-equity-transportation.
RoadTrace, Improving Road Safety Through Connected Vehicle Insights
The world is changing rapidly and technologies that we might think are ‘further down the road,’ can already assist highway engineering. There are millions of connected vehicles on the world’s roads, transmitting data from many sophisticated sensors. This means there is a vast new resource of quantitative data to allow highway engineers to better understand how drivers interact with our roads.
Data everywhere
But with vehicles transmitting continuously, how can we make sense of it? Could we use it to inform our asset management programmes? Could this help in road safety, to identify not only accident black spots, but high-risk areas where a serious crash has not yet occurred? Could this be the tool we need to make a step change in our quest for Vision Zero?
Insights vs Data
Many roads professionals have said ‘don’t bury us in data if it can’t be interpreted.’
Aisin, the Tier 1 global automotive supplier, has been working on this challenge, to take data from the widest range of vehicles and not only analyse it, but also interpret it to provide insights into specific highway maintenance and road safety issues.
Safety Insights
One of the challenges of casualty reduction is that we are usually working retrospectively. A cluster of KSI (Killed or Seriously Injured) crashes will attract the attention of safety engineers. However, to improve outcomes, could we analyse near misses, to understand where serious crashes are likely to occur and intervene in advance? This is the aviation approach.
Insights from connected vehicles, combined with contextual data, can tell us not only how the vehicles interact with our road surfaces, but also the collective behaviour of drivers. Individual driver behaviour is not of interest (all data is anonymised). But why have clusters of drivers repeatedly braked so sharply in location A? At Location B, what is causing road users to decelerate hard from 68mph to 27mph on average, but only at night? What we believe we are seeing, for the first time, are near miss incidents.
The future is here
Aisin are ‘data agnostic,’ recognising that data from only one vehicle manufacturer could skew the results or provide insufficient numbers for statistical significance. Therefore, data is drawn from the widest possible range of vehicles.
Highway operators already have systems to help them manage their networks, so RoadTrace can be integrated, as an additional level of intelligence, within existing highways systems.
Asset Management
Many highway operators use asset management to optimise the performance of their networks, but with bespoke surveys only conducted once a year or less, we may not have sufficient data for decision-making.
It is possible that we intervene too soon on a road surface that might have significant service life remaining. We might act on one road perceived as high risk, but if more detailed road user data could show that the actual risk in that area was low, we might carry out a watching brief on that section, to monitor deterioration, both regularly and remotely.
It is not envisaged that we would stop doing the testing that we rely upon to manage our networks, but now we can add a greater level of detail to what we already know.
Scheme review
When we undertook an improvement scheme on the network, did it do what we intended? Did that junction improvement actually reduce the risk of a crash? Aisin has historical data and collection is ongoing. So, as we implement a scheme, we can analyse the performance before and after. Whether and improvement can be considered effective, much depends on whether it works as intended.
Conclusions
Insights from Connected Vehicles provide highway operators and engineers with a new opportunity to make better informed decisions, based on quantitative data, both in asset management and road safety. The technology is new, but already available across Europe, in the UK and the USA. It can be used to analyse an entire network or a specific area, and can provide both historical insights and ongoing monitoring, without putting any vehicles on the road or boots on the ground. Combined with traditional asset management and road assessment techniques, this is a powerful innovative approach to improve road performance and reduce casualties.
IRIS and EGIS Tackling Safety in Tunnel Roadways
IRIS R&D Group Inc. and Egis partnered to strengthen road user safety and maintenance service levels on critical road and tunnel infrastructures in Brisbane, Australia.
Tunnel Network Services (TNS), an Egis subsidiary, outfitted irisGO technology to their motorway patrol motorbikes to intelligently capture asset conditions on the Inner-City Bypass and adjacent roads.
IRIS melded the power of infratech innovation and computer vision to geospatially record anomalies, automatically create remediation work orders, and visually capture a complete inventory of all road repairs and their assets through the irisCity dashboard.
Before the operational rollout, both companies completed an inventory capture of all assets in the field and conducted a pavement assessment study comparing the results of more traditional LIDAR methods with IRIS’ solution. This collaboration resulted in the development of new technological features such as utilising them on motorbikes and for tunnels.
Motorbikes allow for research and experiment of different camera sensor options for best quality images and improved mechanical camera mount to reduce vibrations. The agility of motorbikes helps improve efficiency because it can move through traffic and road patrolling will not require heavy equipment on heavier vehicles.
IRIS is training AI models for new defect types relevant to tunnels, such as, cracks in walls that can lead to water seepage, accumulation of water, and system redesign to accommodate low light conditions in tunnels. These are critical to the safety of their motorists.
The teams are also in the process of developing the use of in-tunnel drone technology to eliminate the risk of physical inspections in confined spaces.
The implementation of the IRIS’ infratech innovation is one among many initiatives that empower EGIS to modernize the delivery of road operations and maintenance. The partnership is progressing to push the standard operations to improve efficiency, effectiveness, safety and sustainability goals.
Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety Launches a New Accountability Toolkit
The Global Alliance of NGOs for Road Safety has launched an Accountability Toolkit. The toolkit is a set of practical, web-based tools. The toolkit takes the abstract concept of accountability and identifies tangible steps that NGOs can take to hold their governments accountable for their responsibility to enable every person to travel safely and to reduce road deaths and injuries by 50% by 2030, in alignment with the Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021–2030 (Global Plan). Using the toolkit, civil society advocates can:
- Assess what your government is doing or not doing using the ACCOUNTABILITY CHECKLIST;
- Prioritise specific interventions proven to reduce road deaths and injuries using the PRIORITY INTERVENTIONS;
- Define what you want your government to do using the GOVERNMENT TO-DO LIST
- Build your case using the NGO TALKING POINTS, which consolidate research and case studies from around the world, to meet and influence your officials;
- Track your government’s progress in response to your asks using the ADVOCACY AND ACCOUNTABILITY TRACKER.
The Accountability Toolkit is underpinned by five Priority Interventions that have been proven to be among the most effective in reducing road deaths and injuries; have a common focus on protecting pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists; have been identified by Alliance member NGOs as priorities for their countries; and build on recent global advocacy efforts. The five interventions that have been initially prioritised are:
- 30 km/h zones where people walk, cycle, live, and play;
- Lower speed limits;
- Pedestrian facilities;
- Traffic calming;
- Motorcycle helmet law with associated enforcement and promotion.
