Improving traffic safety and reducing the number of road incidents and fatalities is an important priority for many countries and a key UN Sustainable Development Goal.
“Vision Zero” is a global movement, which aims for no deaths or serious injuries on the roads. It is being tackled seriously in Gulf Cooperation Council countries.
In Saudi Arabia, enhanced road safety is a key objective of Saudi Vision 2030, while in the UAE, both Dubai and Abu Dhabi have also established traffic safety plans.
Getting closer to achieving such ambitious objectives will require a broad range of upgrades and improvements. Five of the most significant are a safety-proof road infrastructure, smart vehicles that meet safety-critical standards, empowered commuters who are able to make informed decisions that enhance their safety, efficient operations including advanced traffic and incident management, as well as robust enforcement.
For each of these safety enhancements, technology has a crucial role to play. In particular, the combination of artificial intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) devices – physical objects with sensors and software embedded that allow them to collect and share data – constitute a very promising emerging technological trend that has the potential to allow a quantum leap in road safety and transform mobility as a whole.
Measuring the benefits of road safety in human lives and material savings
The benefits of substantially enhanced road safety in GCC countries are significant. First and foremost, the benefits can be measured in human lives: improvements could lead to thousands of fewer road fatalities in GCC countries every year.
There is also a big economic upside that could be as high as $250 billion over 20 years; such gains are possible through reducing incident-related material losses and secondary crashes, as well as having a significant effect on insurance costs.
Among the secondary benefits are an estimated 30 percent to 40 percent reduction in travel time. And the environment would benefit, too, with a potential decline in emissions of between 10 percent and 20 percent from today’s levels.
How can advanced technologies empower these opportunities? Some demonstrations of how emerging tech can make a major difference are already underway.
Where AI is making a difference
To help improve infrastructure, AI algorithms and IoT devices can – and already are – helping monitor road conditions in real-time. Their deployment can identify problems such as potholes and cracks before they cause traffic incidents.
Saudi Arabia is already piloting AI solutions that can run on affordable dash cams or smartphones attached to the windshield of public buses or municipal vehicles such as vans and street sweepers. The same technology has recently been implemented in Dubai, with Roads and Transport Authority (RTA) patrol cars leveraging AI to scan for road defects in need of maintenance.
Additionally, a new generation of smart vehicles designed to incorporate AI-powered safety features and increasing levels of automation can improve safety in several ways, including allowing safety-critical communication among connected vehicles and between them and the roadside infrastructure. By exchanging data in real-time, these vehicles can create a 360-degree awareness of their surroundings, mitigating traffic incidents.
Consumers can also be empowered through real-time information, for example about road conditions, traffic congestion, and potential hazards – including the speed of their own vehicle. This will enable them to make safer travel decisions and slow down to suit the operating conditions where necessary, for example.
At a systems level, using AI for traffic management – for example, to add a predictive analytics layer that helps optimise traffic lights changes to actual and simulated traffic conditions – can improve flow and reduce congestion. Critically, AI-enabled solutions can allow rapid response to incidents, thereby minimising the risk of further crashes and ensuring that emergency services are dispatched promptly.
In Norway, for example, AI-enabled CCTV cameras detect crashes automatically within 10 seconds after they occur, saving precious time for first aid support.
Finally, innovative technologies provide powerful tools to improve the enforcement of traffic violations. AI-enabled CCTV cameras, which can run computer vision algorithms to detect many different types of violations simultaneously, are becoming more cost-efficient. Saudi Arabia has already introduced edge computing – that is, processing of the captured images within the camera itself rather than in the cloud – for traffic law enforcement as part of its advanced traffic safety programme.
This has reduced costs both related to manual violation processing and from connectivity to centralised processing centres, due to heavy data transfers of the captured images or video streams.
For now, GCC countries still have a higher level of traffic fatalities relative to some other regions. The path forward is to adopt a comprehensive road safety strategy that is informed by data and enabled by technology.
This will require not just national policy- and decision making, but also improved driver education, interoperability of technologies, and adequate funding. However you measure the benefits, the stakes are very high indeed.
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