iRAP encourages innovation and partnerships to eliminate high-risk roads in Europe. Innovation is governed by the iRAP Innovation Framework. Some key innovations in pipeline are:
- AiRAP: AiRAP, the ‘accelerated and intelligent’ data collection, captures the advances in artificial intelligence, machine learning, vision systems (street and sky), LIDAR, telematics and other data sources to deliver critical information on road safety, crash performance, investment prioritisation and the Star Rating of roads for all road users.
- ITS Rating: The use of a range of ITS solutions is helping to reduce crash rates on high-standard expressways and motorways. ITS solutions include ramp metering, incident detection, weather monitoring, VMS/ advance warning, lane keeping, hard-shoulder running and variable speed limits. ITS rating work comes under these iRAP Innovation Partnerships: Shunt crash model & ITS enhanced
- Autonomous Driving (AD) Star Rating: Star Rating for Autonomous Driving (SR4AD) is an enhanced module to assist authorities in assessing the readiness and safety of road infrastructure. In particular, it will help measure how well road supports driver assistance technologies and increasing levels of autonomous vehicles. Autonomous Driving (AD) Star Rating work comes under this iRAP Innovation Partnership: Safe roads for autonomous vehicles
- 5-Star Cities: 5-Star Cities is measuring, managing and communicating the risk ‘built-in’ to roads around cities.-
- Safe schools: The award-winning Star Rating for Schools (SR4S) programme and app is an evidence-based tool for measuring, managing and communicating the risk ‘built-in’ to roads around schools. The safety of children walking along and across roads on their journey to school is a major concern. SR4S is an easy-to-use, universal, low-cost application, that supports quick interventions that save lives and injuries from day one.
- CycleRAP: In response to the renewed interest in bicycling, road authorities are grappling with infrastructure provision for bicyclists and associated impacts on user safety. CycleRAP is a bicyclist-specific risk assessment tool piloted first in Europe.
- Urban Investment Plans: Urban Investment Plans help road authorities to understand how risk changes along an individual road section or across a network, based on the safety performance of the infrastructure itself.
If you want to find out more information about how iRAP encourages, and harnesses the power of, innovation and partnerships please visit the iRAP website https://www.irap.org/innovation/