German transportation software developer PTV Group will show how new mobility analysis tools can help improve safety on the world’s roads at next week’s International Transport Forum (ITF) Summit in Leipzig, Germany.
The world’s largest gathering of transport ministers and the leading global transport policy event, the ITF Summit will take place from May 23-25, with around 1,400 decision-makers from more than 80 countries expected to attend. The Summit’s focus this year is on road safety under the banner ‘Transport Safety & Security’. The PTV Group will show how new mobility concepts can help improve safety on the roads. As governments and highway authorities worldwide adopt the ‘Vision Zero’ concept of nil road fatalities, PTV will be demonstrating how intelligent software solutions are helping to achieve this by integrating different aspects of road safety analysis into strategic decisions for transport planning and preparation for future mobility scenarios.
PTV will be showing how the use of computer modeling and simulation systems will allow road operators to examine strategies more precisely and understand the effects of individual measures. The company will be presenting its Vistad software system for the first time at the ITF. Designed to enable cooperative use by multiple agencies and stakeholders, Vistad is a state-of-the-art software system for the collection, validation and analysis of traffic accident data. With over 1,000 users worldwide, the application is already standard equipment at 11 of 16 police agencies in the German federal states. As well as police and government agencies, Vistad is being increasingly used by communities, road safety organizations and accident commissions to help formulate effective mitigation measures and advance traffic crash research.
PTV is highlighting the importance of road safety to the company, which is underscored by the newly-created position of ‘solution director of traffic safety’, which Sofia Salek de Braun took over in September 2017. The native Bolivian has been committed to the topic of traffic safety at the company for many years, and she regards a large part of her job as raising the public awareness of traffic safety issues. During a press conference at the Summit, PTV’s road safety ambassador will report on how she works to develop concrete actions and initiatives relating to Vision Zero with international partners including the World Bank.
At the ITF’s ‘Women mobilize Women’ conference the day before, de Braun will also deliver a keynote speech on the topic ‘Why safe roads and transport matter to all of us.’ Her work at the Summit concludes with a talk on ‘Mobilizing Multi-Stakeholder Actions for Road Safety – a case example from Bolivia’, which is based on a practical example from de Braun’s homeland where she has been working for greater safety on the roads since 2016, by assisting various actors to formulate a transport safety program.
“I am convinced that change is only possible if all actors in a transport system, from the authorities to automobile manufacturers to each individual driver, take responsibility and work together,” noted de Braun. “For the first time in Bolivia, members of national, regional and local governments sat down at the table with representatives from the police, universities, industry, media and voluntary organizations. Only this way could we change so much there.”
