In recent years, Bulgaria has faced a significant challenge in road safety, with alarming fatality rates that have placed it among the most dangerous countries for drivers in the European Union. As we delve into the latest statistics and ongoing initiatives, it becomes clear that while progress is being made, there's still a long road ahead to ensure safer travels for all.
The Current State of Road Safety in Bulgaria
Recent data paints a sobering picture of road safety in Bulgaria. In 2022, the country reported 78 road deaths per million inhabitants, securing the unfortunate position of having the second-highest fatality rate in the EU. To put this into perspective, that's about 561 lives lost on Bulgarian roads in a single year. While this represents a slight improvement from previous years, it's still significantly higher than the EU average of 46 deaths per million inhabitants. These numbers aren't just statistics; they represent real lives lost and families forever changed.
Breaking Down the Numbers
Signs of Progress
Addressing the Root Causes
Looking to the Future: Initiatives and Investments
Revolutionising Road Safety with Advanced Toll Systems
Recognising these critical challenges, Fisch has embarked on an ambitious project valued at over 100 million Bulgarian lev to implement a comprehensive toll system. Recent developments have expanded this project to include average speed checks using toll cameras according to various news sources (Mediapool.bg,Money.bg,Economic.bg) aiming to reduce speeding—a leading cause of fatal accidents.
Addressing a Critical Safety Challenge
The importance of this project cannot be overstated. By leveraging existing toll cameras to monitor and enforce speed limits, one of the root causes of road accidents can be tackled. The methodology is straightforward yet powerful: by recording vehicle detections at various checkpoints and calculating the time it takes to travel between these points, average speeds can be accurately estimated and speeding vehicles identified.
Managing High Traffic Volumes
To put the system in perspective, we decided to estimate what it should look like and what capacity it should have. To do this, we start with the worst-case traffic scenarios, such as vehicles travelling at 160 km/h with only 20-30 meters between them with a constant traffic flow. As suspected, the system must handle a substantial volume of data, but let's explore how much roughly:
Given an average traffic speed of 160 km/h = 44.44 meters per second with a minimum distance of 20 meters between vehicles (including vehicle length), it means that each camera will get 2.22 vehicles/second. Given that the toll systems typically monitor two lanes simultaneously,  the maximum number of vehicles per second for each camera post should be approximately 4.44 vehicles/second. For the entire network of 295 static toll cameras, assuming each camera monitors one lane, the total number of vehicles to be processed per second is 1,310 vehicles/second for real-time operation of the whole Bulgarian traffic network in the worst possible traffic conditions.
Simulation and Use Case Demonstration
Motivated by our constant epistemic curiosity, we conducted a demo to underscore the practical effectiveness and technical robustness of what a potential solution can look like in real-world conditions. We fitted our early prototype system with simulation capabilities to better comprehend how the process would work and what practical challenges and limitations Fischer might run into. By demonstrating the system's capacity to manage high traffic volumes and enforce speed limits effectively, we are able to (i) reassure people of the impact of such a system as well as (ii) demonstrate how controlling the average speed in Bulgaria using the already established infrastructure is within reach. This proof of concept highlights the potential benefits for road safety, emphasising the critical need for adopting such advanced monitoring systems to foster safer driving environments.
For the purpose of our demonstration, we have used fake data for the cars and owners in our database, and any similarities to real people, cars, or other data are purely coincidental. We used Google API to fetch some of the main road arteries in Bulgaria and placed camera markers every 10 kilometres or so, resulting in more than 170 cameras in total. Then we generated 10000 fake cars belonging to 8000 fake people, and we ran the simulation with a total of 70 cars driving simultaneously across these roads with randomly variating speeds that gravitate around the speed limits. For the speed limits between the cameras, we simply used the Google Directions time as an estimate.
Conclusion
By integrating advanced technology and leveraging realistic simulated infrastructure, we wish to express our readiness to make a significant impact on road safety and to bring awareness that such systems should be sought after as they might well be a contributing factor to bringing the death toll on Bulgarian and not only Bulgarian roads down. Enhancing the toll system with average speed checks represents a critical step forward in reducing traffic-related fatalities and promoting safer driving practices. We are proud to lead this initiative and are committed to continuing our efforts to innovate and improve road safety measures.
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