Crit Race Used To Demo New Safety Technology for Vulnerable Road Users
Curiosity Lab, located in Peachtree Corners, Georgia, recently launched a collaboration with Spoke, a company working to improve road safety and connectivity by focusing on vulnerable road users (VRUs).
This new technology “provides insight and contextual awareness to drivers by connecting VRUs to the mobility ecosystem around them, ensuring VRUs are seen and protected.”
Curiosity Lab is a “living, breathing, real world ecosystem, that was created to provide a next level technology testing environment for national and international companies.” In other words, a “real world” environment to test state of the art technology. And one area of technology that they’re most interested in is safe infrastructure and the ability for all road users to detect one another.
The location of the company is significant. Peachtree Corners, Georgia—25 miles northeast of Atlanta—is one of the nation’s first smart cities. Think electric vehicles, solar panels, sensors, and cameras everywhere.
And a crit race in Peachtree Corners seemed to be the perfect opportunity to put the new tech on display.
Professional cyclists had a small device on their bikes with a chip that communicates with any car that’s also equipped with a chip. An event car on the race course demonstrated how the communication works between driver and cyclist.
Both the driver of the vehicle and the bike rider get alerts even before they can even see one another. The alert tells the user which direction another user is coming from, and how far away they are.
The new system relies on LTE/5G cellular communications for alerts between cars and VRUs with a camera/radar system. Peachtree Corners Assistant City Manager Brandon Branham told Fox News Atlanta, “This device can be on a bicycle, on a motorcycle, on an e-scooter. We’re even looking at putting this on our construction workers.”
According to a press release, Peachtree Corners City Manager Brian Johnson said, “Each year nearly 1,000 bicyclists are killed and over 130,000 are injured in crashes or incidents on public roadways in the United States. Spoke’s technology is the first C-V2X implementation made for pedestrians, cyclists and other VRUs to use while along public roadways.”
The next goal is to put this technology in an app, so that all users within a cell phone network can take advantage of the alerts. When thinking about vulnerable users, though, that does omit those without access to a cell phone. Hopefully the technology will advance in a way that detects all people, not just those carrying a phone in their pocket.
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