Using fleets to map the safety of our streets was the focus of an innovative session joined by iRAP CEO Rob McInerney recently at the Together for Safer Roads (TSR) Annual Meeting in the USA.

On 14 September, Rob presented in the session alongside leading fleet experts including:

• David Braunstein, President, Together for Safer Roads;
• Patrick Breiner, Partner Growth Lead, Roadbotics;
• Bruce Hamilton, usRAP Lead and Managing Director, Roadway Safety Foundation;
• Jessie Lazarus, Vice-President, Carmera, Woven Planet Company; and
• Jason Whittet, Digital Innovation Lead – Smart Cities, Amazon Web Services

Rob asked attending fleet managers to imagine a scenario:

Imagine you are doing your workplace risk assessment – you have your clip-board and you

• go to the 10th floor balcony and there is no balcony rail
• You open the elevator door and realise there are 2 cabins inside the same chamber hurtling towards each other separated by a thin slice of air
• You walk into the kitchen area and a delivery van flies past you at 40 miles per hour

If that was your office it would be shut down.  Unfortunately it is your experience each and every day on roads in the USA and all around the world.

Rob’s speech explained the importance of Star Ratings for fleet safety management and how iRAP data can become an essential part of fleet business and companies’ health and safety response.

He also profiled the potential of AiRAP to unlock data insights to inform fleet safety decisions and exciting projects underway in the US, Europe, Australia, Vietnam, Africa and Latin America supporting the accelerated and intelligent collection of RAP data.

Rob said, “Source data such as Google StreetView and Mapillary Imagery, satellite data, mapping, video and LiDAR data, Mobileye sensor data, Waymo and other autonomous and advanced car technologies, telematics data from “vehicle black boxes” and mobile phone and app data like Strava – coded and accredited to the same global iRAP specification – hold enormous potential to inform fleet safety initiatives to reduce workplace road fatalities and injuries.

“Fleet operators like UPS, PEPSICO, ABInBev and Republic Services can be a large and significant part of source data collection and benefit from the processed results.

“Making sure the data is coded to the same global iRAP specification and AiRAP accreditation will ensure that any algorithms developed by companies like Samsara, GeoTAB and AutoLiv can be consistently applied regardless of the source data.

“Likewise the same algorithms guiding safety decision making in the USA will work in Mexico, Brazil, France, India, Nigeria or the Philippines even though what delivers high-quality results on the US Interstate network may be very different to the source data, technology and algorithms to drive pedestrian star ratings in Boston or Bogota.

“The AiRAP accreditation will be central to the development of the AiRAP Data Marketplace that will connect providers of infrastructure data with the consumers of that data,” Rob said.

“In the future, fleets may star rate our streets and every partner, armed with the knowledge of where the 1-star roads are, may advocate for improved safety for their fleets, their staff and the communities where the operate.”

Download a copy of Rob’s speech here.

Register to watch the session replay here.

See a transcript of the session here.

Rob and David Braunstein will both present, alongside other members of the AiRAP team, on 7 and 14 October at the 2021 Innovation Workshop being hosted by iRAP and the Regional Road Safety Observatories on “Data Driven Innovation to Halve Global Road Deaths by 2030”. Read more on the event and register for free here.