GPS: Is the Shortest Route the Safest?

An American study shows that the GPS does not take into account the dangerousness of the roads in the calculation of the routes. Researchers at Texas A&M propose applications to integrate an algorithm that takes into account the quality of the roadway and lighting or even previous accident data.

The GPS (Global Positioning System), present in many land, air and sea vehicles but also in a majority of smartphones, is now part of our daily lives. Unisciel and the University of Lille 1 explain to us, with the Kézako program, how this system works.

When you enter a route on your GPS, you most often have the choice between the shortest and the fastest. But isn’t the real question, which is the safest route? This is the question posed by researchers at Texas A&M University. To do this, they compared the safest and shortest routes between five very dense areas of Texas: Dallas-Fort Worth, Waco, Austin, Houston and Bryan-College Station. This includes 29,000 different routes, and they found that taking a route with an 8% reduction in travel time could increase crash risk by 23%. Nicknamed the “Texas Triangle”, this area includes nearly 29,000 roads for 18 million inhabitants.

“As guidance systems aim to find the shortest path between a starting point and an ending point, they can lead motorists to take routes that can minimize travel time, but which, at the same time, poses a greater risk of accidents,” writes Dominique Lord, a professor in the Zachry Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering.

For this study, researchers collected and combined road and traffic characteristics, including their geometric design, number and width of lanes, lighting and average daily traffic, weather conditions, and historical data. on accidents in order to analyze and develop statistical models to predict the risk of being involved in accidents.

Published in the journal Transportation Research Part C, the study revealed inconsistencies in the shortest and safest routes. In good weather, taking the shorter route instead of the safer one between Dallas-Fort Worth and Bryan-College Station will reduce travel time by 8%. Nevertheless, the probability of an accident increases by 20%. The analysis suggests that taking the longer route between Austin and Houston with an 11% increase in travel time leads to a 1% decrease in the daily probability of accidents.

Overall, roads that have a higher risk of accidents contain poor geometric designs, water drainage problems, lack of lighting and a higher risk of collisions with animals. As a result, these experts propose a new system architecture to find the safest route using navigation systems, with the integration of an algorithm that obviously takes into account current traffic, but also the history of pavement design and possible accidents. The quality of lighting and equipment, but also the very geometry of the routes should be taken into account when calculating a route.

GPS: Is the Shortest Route the Safest?

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