Exclusive to GovTech Europe, tech solutions and traffic safety firm Bercman explain how the Estonian public sector is using tech to combat road dangers.
WHAT PARTICULAR ISSUES ABOUT ESTONIAN TRAFFIC ARE MOST PRESSING?
We still have an increasing number of traffic accidents happening, and it is costing the countries more and more. Overall economic costs of road crashes range from 2-5% of GDP in most countries. People lose their jobs after traffic accidents, their recovery takes time, and it also takes longer to find jobs.
Based on official statistics of 2021, there were 1564 traffic accidents with human casualties in Estonia, in which 1763 people were injured and 55 were killed. Compared to 2020, the number of traffic accidents went up by 158, mostly due to the addition of personal light electric vehicle accidents. The number of injured people increased by 147. And even though fatalities are slowly decreasing, economic impact stays very high.
To improve road safety, the Transport Administration of Estonia is constantly working to identify and rebuild dangerous sections and junctions on roads. Every year, a list of places in need of safety improvements is drawn up and funds are allocated from the road maintenance plan. And although last year saw the biggest number of dangerous junctions rebuilt – with road crossings, lighting, footpaths, and pedestrian crossings to improve pedestrian safety – this has not yet been accompanied by a sharp drop in road accidents.
WHAT SUCCESS EXAMPLES HAVE COME FROM BERCMAN SO FAR?
As we have been busy developing the world’s most intelligent roadside infrastructure product, we call the Smart Pedestrian Crosswalk (SPC), we have been focused on mitigating the risks that go with that ultra-common scenario: a pedestrian crossing a road, and potentially putting themselves in front of a 2-tonne metal machine.
The Smart Pedestrian Crosswalk system has been deployed in multiple countries in Europe (Estonia, Greece, Croatia and others) already, and it’s becoming more and more accepted as a new standard providing active and passive safety for pedestrians.
At the request of Bercman, Tallinn University of Technology carried out a study to assess the impact of the Smart Pedestrian Crosswalk installed in Estonia.
The results have shown that SPC reduces the chance of a dangerous traffic situation by 44% on average. However, these results are quite general, and further, more specific study is required. Nevertheless, we can see that a smart crossing has a positive impact on reducing road risks.
This is just the beginning. We are also developing active collision prevention software to detect potential accidents. The software will be upgradable, with all existing smart pedestrian crosswalks receiving improvements at a later stage.
BERCMAN’S MISSION
Bercman was founded in 2016 and primarily engaged in the development and sale of products and services for increasing road safety.
Its story began when the brother of cofounder Mart Suurkask’s best friend died in a car accident, leaving his one-year-old son fatherless. By this time, Mart had become aware of the sad traffic statistics in Europe and was surprised that in the current information age there was still no cost-effective solution for increasing road safety, particularly in obviously hazardous locations such as unregulated pedestrian crossings. Mart believed that the problem could be solved with a smart system that does everything possible to reduce the risk of collisions between road users.
Bercman’s mission is to anticipate and prevent avoidable traffic accidents and to accelerate progress towards the widespread introduction of self-driving and connected vehicles to achieve this.
The company’s first and flagship product to fulfil its mission is the Smart Pedestrian Crosswalk: a safety system based on machine vision for unregulated pedestrian crossings. It uses sensors to detect pedestrians crossing a given road, as well as approaching vehicles. It then gives visual cues to the vehicle driver to pay attention to the crossing pedestrian.
WHAT ARE THE BIGGEST TECH CHALLENGES FACING FIRMS LIKE BERCMAN, SEEKING TO MODERNIZE TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT AND MOVE TOWARDS SELF-DRIVING?
Our technology uses a computing system that’s installed at the crosswalk – which means on-site technical infrastructure; nothing is computed in the cloud. This places high demands on the system’s on-site computing capacity. We call it a ‘local intelligence’.
One of the challenges is also real-time data fusion to synthesize the data generated from various touchpoints and sensors, in our case, this means data from camera and radar. It’s one of the key elements which we need to get absolutely right, and we are working hard on it.
In addition, we are quite close to the advent of self-driving cars, so naturally, we have designed our system in a way that lets us communicate with automated vehicles. The problem is that the process of getting more connected vehicles on the road is quite slow. It would be very helpful if this connectivity between vehicles and infrastructure became a standardised way of operating within a couple of years.
And, of course, it is important that the regulatory side supports the implementation of innovation rather than creating barriers to it.
WHAT SOLUTIONS ARE COMING DOWN THE TRACKS NEXT THAT EXCITE BERCMAN THE MOST? WHAT CAN THEY ENABLE?
Firstly, the ICU (Intersection Control Unit) which is essentially modernising all existing traffic lights and bringing them to the 21st century. ICU provides oversight of the intersection, automatic detection of pedestrians and collects all kinds of useful data.
In addition to ICU, we are very excited to be moving ahead with the active accident prevention algorithms so that in the near future, all Bercman products essentially become accident-preventing infrastructure.
Thirdly, we are about to launch the world’s first open environment average speed measurement system, which aims to be the most cost-effective and impactful in terms of traffic safety in urban areas as well as on highways. We hope to install such a system during summer 2022 and see it in action by the end of the season.
HOW DO BERCMAN’S SOLUTIONS TRANSLATE AS TEMPLATES FOR OTHER EUROPEAN COUNTRIES?
In Europe, we are basically in the same regulatory environment, and we’re designing our software and hardware solutions in a way that it would fit in with any European country. In cases where local regulations differ from what we’re used to, we are working closely together with our distributors to foresee any kind of problems and solve them in advance.
