Pedestrian road safety in Tel Aviv

In 2020, pedestrians constituted 16% of all road users in the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo. The municipality’s goal is to increase the percentage to 20% by 2030. Israel has a higher casualty rate of pedestrians than the OECD average, and the municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo is leading a mobility strategy that aims to prioritise pedestrians to increase walkability, promote shared mobility and micromobility, and boost the use of public transport. One of the key lines of action for the city aims to ensure pedestrians are safe, and consequently reduce the number of pedestrian injuries and fatalities.

Cognata has created a safety digital twin of a road section within the city of Tel Aviv-Yafo. This road section is a part of the municipality’s Vision Zero project, aiming to reach zero casualties in road accidents. Cognata and the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality will establish the safety use cases to be examined using the safety digital twin, focusing on lines of sight and speeds of different road users. For example, dangerous incidents include motorcycles overtaking, and trucks parking in the righthand lane and blocking other drivers’ vision. After creating and performing large-scale analytics of the scenarios, Cognata will create a report on accident probability in the area, based on the lines of sight, speeds and initial positions of road users. This report will give the municipality valuable insights to help improve road safety in the area.

The project pilot will:

• identify the most dangerous scenarios, for example, motorcycles overtaking parked trucks creates a multi-danger zone (more than 45% chance of an accident);

• identify the most dangerous locations for unloading trucks;

• demonstrate that the 50 km/h basic speed limit causes almost 50% more accidents than 40 km/h.