The Floow recently contributed towards a ground-breaking project that aims to improve the safety of England’s most dangerous roads. The Department for Transport’s £47.5 million Safer Roads Fund aims to prevent 760 fatal and serious injuries over the next 20 years through targeted interventions across 27 high-risk roads.
The estimated reduction in the number of casualties forms part of a comprehensive risk assessment carried out by the charity, Road Safety Foundation (RSF), which, for the first time, incorporates speed statistics derived from The Floow’s telematics data. Taking the real-world behaviour of drivers into account allows road safety professionals to obtain their most accurate understanding of where and how road-users are most at risk. One such statistic, the so-called ‘85th speed’, is a well-established tool that is used by road safety professionals, transport authorities, and actuaries the world over. The 85th speed is the speed beneath which 85% of the traffic travels at a given point, as shown by the illustration below.
Previous surveys inferred the 85th speed from assuming a basic relationship between the speeds chosen by drivers when travelling within a particular speed limit; a figure that could remain unchanged over extended distances. This survey is the first such study that incorporates the dramatic variation in speed that occurs at scales shorter than 100 m.
The supply of these speed data to such a significant project marks an important milestone for The Floow’s data supply brand, MobilityIn. Launched in 2020, MobilityIn aimed to make roads safer by supplying novel road usage solutions to long-standing mobility problems. Since launch, The Floow has provided data to more than 100 projects across the UK. These data have supported transport reviews or improvements in most UK core cities, almost half of London boroughs, and many smaller towns and villages. The Floow has also supplied many datasets to the Road Safety Foundation for individual road assessments across multiple UK sites. Those projects demonstrated the value of telematics data in understanding road risk to best assign funding to where it can achieve the biggest improvements to road safety.
For more details on MobilityIn: https://thefloow.com/mobilityIn .
For more details on the wider work of the Road Safety Foundation, please see
https://roadsafetyfoundation.org/ .
For the Department for Transport press release on this funding, please see https://www.gov.uk/government/news/nearly-50-million-boost-for-safer-roads-across-england
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