The Future of Risk: The Impacts of New Technology Article written by Dr Sam Chapman
With 1.3 million fatalities occurring on the world’s roads every year, and an estimated 60 million receiving serious injuries, road risk is fundamentally one of the biggest impacts on our wellbeing. In fact, road risk causes at least 22 times as many fatalities as warfare.
Photo by Puria Berenji on Unsplash
Despite these horrific figures, the situation used to be a lot worse. As new awareness, regulation and safer systems have been adopted the risks have continued to decrease over time. Add to that, an ever upward increase in vehicle miles travelled, and this is a very positive trend.
understand emerging changes and the risk they may alter. The work looks to evolve regulation and data usage to decrease the impacts of emergent risk from new technology.
However, a closer look at more recent history highlights a decline in the rate of this risk reduction, with gains levelling off at the same time technology is still advancing.
In order to understand these impacts, it is vital to understand how risk is mitigated.
So as we continue to add new technologies, what will be the future effect on risk?
the surrounding area. However over the many years of mobility numerous mitigations have been evolved to reduce underlying risks. Although mitigations are numerous they can be broadly grouped into three key areas that collectively work to reduce risks during travel:
Investigations in this area by The Floow have led to numerous world leading research projects, for example the MOVE_UK project. MOVE_UK brings together world leading organisations to investigate the impact of new vehicle technologies upon risk. This aims to better
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The risk of any vehicle travelling at speed is inherently high for both vehicles and people in
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Vehicle safety
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Infrastructure safety
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Behavioural safety
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