VRIEDRICH – Traffic observation and analysis in rural areas in the context of road safety
VRIEDRICH – Traffic observation and analysis in rural areas in the context of road safety
In the VRIEDRICH project, the DLR is investigating traffic on rural roads on behalf of the German Road Safety Council (DVR). From this, it derives measures for traffic control that increase the safety of rural traffic.
Road safety plays a central role in the design of the transport system of the future. In the spirit of Vision Zero, the aim is to reduce - and ideally eliminate - accidents resulting in fatalities and serious injuries. The majority of accidents with fatalities (approx. 1,500) in Germany in 2021 occurred on rural roads (61%), compared to motorways (9%) and inner-city areas (30%). Around half of the fatalities were car drivers and a quarter were motorcyclists. There were also around 22,000 seriously injured road users on rural roads. Despite this, the rural road as an infrastructural area is less of a focus in research, e.g. in the current context of automated driving, compared to the motorway and inner-city areas. The German Aerospace Centre (DLR) now wants to change this in the VRIEDRICH project, for which it has been commissioned by the German Road Safety Council (DVR).
The overall aim of the project is to support the derivation and discussion of measures to improve road safety through practical findings on local traffic conditions. In joint coordination with the German Road Safety Council (DVR), the DLR-Institute of Transportation Systems has selected a measurement site on a federal highway south of Berlin. DLR will carry out traffic monitoring at the selected location for a fortnight using a mobile measuring station. To this end, the scientists will detect, track and classify motorised and non-motorised traffic using cameras, so that anonymised movement data (trajectories) are available. The result material for microscopic traffic analyses consists of trajectory data (including time stamps, positions, speed) and augmented scene videos, which can be used to check the plausibility of the measurements. As part of the data analysis, the researchers can identify safety-critical traffic events and derive findings regarding their occurrence. They also define traffic scenarios to be analysed in the context of rural roads. Examples include overtaking a slower vehicle or cyclist or pedestrians crossing the road. Turning off a minor road is also characterised by conflicting flows. In this way, the scientists can derive relevant research questions for the data analysis. In addition, they want to identify road users' demands on the traffic system, such as the frequency of use of the main road by cyclists or favoured crossing points for pedestrians.
Augmented camera image from the video recording of the mobile measuring station.
