Industrial partnership set to enhance road safety thanks to AI

French tech company Vianova just released an innovative tool to improve all road users’ safety, especially vulnerable ones. In collaboration with several leading car manufacturers, Vianova recently developed a Road Safety dashboard, which aims at helping identify road risks and prevent traffic casualties thanks to Machine Learning. With this new feature, Vianova is now ready to empower multiple mobility providers and cities to achieve their vision for zero killed or seriously injured road users.

Using millions of anonymized data points provided by car manufacturers, Vianova was able to detect and rank dangerous road corridors as well as hard braking events across several major European cities. Combining this data with world-class analysis of active travel data from vulnerable road users (e.g. pedestrians, cyclists, shared micro-mobility users) and street segment data, Vianova’s algorithms represent a major potential for urban planners in cities to improve their ability to identify and resolve safety risks as cities grow denser and mobility complexifies.

This innovation is in line with governments’ ambitious goal to achieve Vision Zero (zero killed or seriously injured road users). While 41% of road traffic fatalities in urban areas involve a car and another mode of transportation, improving the integration of light modes of transportation (i.e. bikes, e-scooters, e-bikes, etc.) is key to pursue local authorities’ security as well as sustainability objectives.

Vianova’s COO, Thibaud Febvre, expressed excitement about this forward-thinking development:

“Part of the work we do at Vianova is understanding how to visualize and interpret large sets of connected vehicle data — what lessons could we learn from focusing on private cars instead of shared bikes and scooters? And what are the areas of overlap between vision zero and carbon zero? This led us to begin to retool our core product, Cityscope, with the features that will turn it into a source of road safety intelligence for mobility providers and cities in the future.”

Vianova’s Road Safety API is currently being tested and fine-tuned in the cities of Zurich and Basel where early results are promising. In these urban environments, the partnering car manufacturers were able to gather powerful insights in order to qualify tens of risk zones. ​ This critical information will eventually be fed into their navigation systems and communicated to drivers in order to warn them of dangerous intersections and other hazards to avoid any collision with a bike or an e-scooter. With this innovation, autonomous and connected vehicles will improve their capacity to alter their course in mixed traffic zones, thus improving the coexistence of multiple different transport modes in our urban environments

Vianova will keep calibrating the model and test its robustness before applying it to other cities in collaboration with additional car manufacturers, in order to eventually embed it into millions of vehicles. Expanding on this Road Safety API initiative and supporting the safety of road users across the globe through better data insights, places Vianova within a broader United Nations framework which is looking to harness Artificial Intelligence in order to reduce road traffic fatalities and save lives.

Notes for editors

About Vianova

Vianova is the trusted mobility intelligence platform for mobility providers and cities to achieve CarbonZero and VisionZero. Our platform helps multiple clients foster greener and safer streets while optimizing their operations' economics. Through its platform and API suite, Vianova serves 100 cities, transport providers and enterprises across the globe, thus enabling the offset of 5 millions tons of CO2 every year. Vianova has offices in Paris, Zürich, London, Berlin and Dover (USA).

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