The EU-funded ‘Predictive Approaches for Safer Urban Environment’ (PHOEBE) project brings together the interdisciplinary power of traffic simulation and road safety assessment to increase road safety, focusing on those more vulnerable in traffic using active and micromobility. The PHOEBE framework combines research, data, and innovative tools and models to simulate and forecast the safety impact of disruptive changes, transitions or scenarios across urban transport networks. The 3.5-year- long PHOEBE project will apply and refine the framework in real-world scenarios across three pilot sites: Athens (GR), Valencia (ES) and West Midlands (UK).
The challenge: Recent European Union statistics on urban road fatalities suggest that even though road fatalities are constantly declining, still nearly 7500 fatalities were recorded in the EU27 in 2020. This number of urban fatalities represents around 40% of all road fatalities.The predominantly car-centric mobility planning of past decades create passenger car congestion in urban environments across the continent. Furthermore, lacking speed limit compliance, car-centric spatial design and reckless driving create a precarious or even dangerous urban landscape for pedestrians, cyclists, users of emerging mobility solutions and vulnerable road users. The latter group is facing significant challenges, as traffic flows might be too fast in urban environments or street spaces are too crowded. Therefore, the PHOEBE project is following the ambitious ‘Vision Zero’ goal that was formulated by the European Commission with the aim to halve the number of road fatalities by 2020 and a long term-goal to move close to zero fatalities by 2050.THE
The plan: PHOEBE is developing an integrated, dynamic human-centred predictive safety assessment framework for all road user types in urban areas. This will be achieved by bringing together traffic simulation, road safety assessment, data concerning human behaviour and mode shift, as well as demand modelling of new and emerging mobility data. The unique PHOEBE plan to develop integrated modelling and simulation tools to help cities to plan urban road safety measures. PHOEBE will be able to predict and assess safety impacts at the transport system level without the need for detailed simulation of the entire network by applying a simple Select - Simulate - Evaluate - Extrapolate approach. Overall, the results of PHOEBE can be used as a blueprint by other European cities to developed their own knowledge products, such as socioeconomic analysis model, urban road safety assessment, human behaviour and choice modelling. It will show how cities can establish and apply the predictive safety assessment framework in an efficient and cost-effective way, providing a theoretical guide on how it works, and how to implement it and knowledge products.
