Navigation Tools Could be Pointing Drivers to the Shortest Route - But Not the Safest
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Dominique Lord and Soheil Sohrabi, with funding from the A.P. and Florence Wiley Faculty Fellow at Texas A&M, designed a study to examine the safety of navigational tools. Comparing the safest and shortest routes between five metropolitan areas in Texas -- Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, Houston and Bryan-College Station -- including more than 29,000 road segments, they found that taking a route with an 8% reduction in travel time could increase the risk of being in a crash by 23%.
"As route guidance systems aim to find the shortest path between a beginning and ending point, they can misguide drivers to take routes that may minimize travel time, but concurrently, carry a greater risk of crashes," said Lord, professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.
The researchers collected and combined road and traffic characteristics, including geometry design, number of lanes, lane width, lighting and average daily traffic, weather conditions and historical crash data to analyze and develop statistical models for predicting the risk of being involved in crashes.
The study revealed inconsistencies in the shortest and safest routes. In clear weather conditions, taking the shortest route instead of the safest between Dallas-Fort Worth and Bryan-College Station will reduce the travel time by 8%. Still, the probability of a crash increases to 20%. The analysis suggests that taking the longest route between Austin and Houston with an 11% increase in travel time results in a 1% decrease in the daily probability of crashes.
[...] "Given the fact that crashes can affect not only those involved but also other road users, leaving the choice between safety and time to the users may result in unethical decisions and unfair consequences," Sohrabi said.
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.