UBC engineering prof using video technology to prevent car crashes
Posted June 15, 2015 11:51 pm.
Last Updated June 16, 2015 6:34 am.
This article is more than 5 years old.
VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Most people have experienced it on our roads, a time where you almost get into a car accident. A UBC transport engineer has developed new video technology looking at all those near misses to help make roads safer and ultimately prevent car crashes.
Cities normally study 3 years of crash stats to determine dangerous intersection but UBC Engineering Professor Tarek Sayed says it’s better to be proactive than reactive.
His method is to set up cameras from different angles, to record cars and pedestrians moving which explain a lot about behaviour and what’s wrong with the design of locations.
“While in this approach because conflicts are much more frequent than collisions, we can observe, we can analyze and we can come up with counter measures really quick in a matter of a few hours.”
He says it works a lot faster than waiting crash stats to accumulate.
“We can take a video a location and we can track anything that moves and we calculate near misses and we can understand behaviour in a much better way than relying on collision data.”
He used this technique to improve the north end of the Burrard Street Bridge and the intersection at Main and Hastings and now other municipalities in Metro Vancouver and around the world are showing interest. So far, about 12 countries are using his help.
