TS: Pedal Misapplication Prevention Device Cuts Accident Rate by 33.3% for Taxis Serving People with Disabilities

[Financial News] The accident rate among taxis for people with disabilities fitted with a pedal misapplication prevention device and a speed limiter fell 33.3% year over year, according to the findings.
On the 21st, the Korea Transportation Safety Authority (TS) announced the results of its analysis of demonstration data from January through July this year for the two devices installed on Incheon Transit Corporation’s taxis for people with disabilities. The decline was about 28 percentage points greater than the rate for vehicles without the devices.
Incheon Transit Corporation signed a business agreement with TS last September and installed the devices on 100 taxis for people with disabilities between October and December of the same year.
The accident analysis compared at-fault traffic accidents that occurred from January through June last year and this year. The accident rate per equipped vehicle fell 33.3%, from 0.060 to 0.040 incidents. The accident rate among the 176 unequipped vehicles declined by 5.3%.
Over seven months, the pedal misapplication prevention function activated 175 times, and the speed-limiting function activated 22,839 times. The pedal misapplication prevention function cuts off accelerator input if the pedal is pressed excessively while driving at low speed or if engine RPM reaches a set threshold. The speed-limiting function controls vehicle output if the vehicle exceeds the speed limit in front of a speed camera or is driven at 140 km/h or faster.
Risky behavior was concentrated in a small number of vehicles. Of the 175 suspected cases of pedal misapplication, 148—or 84.6%—occurred in the 11 vehicles with the most such cases. The other 78 vehicles in which cases were recorded accounted for 27 incidents.
The top 11 vehicles had 4.64 times as many instances of rapid acceleration and 2.83 times as many rapid starts as the other vehicles. Their safe-driving score, which reflects the frequency of dangerous driving behaviors, was also 82.2 points, 5.3 points below the 87.5-point score of the other vehicles.
A similar concentration was found in an earlier pilot project involving 227 corporate taxis. The top 10 vehicles in terms of pedal misapplication prevention activations accounted for 70.6% of activations among corporate taxis and 81.7% among taxis for people with disabilities. The number of activations in the same vehicles tracked fell by 25.0% and 35.3%, respectively, also indicating the potential for improved driving habits.
TS plans to use data on vehicles and drivers with concentrated risky driving for individual consultations and safety training. Incheon Transit Corporation plans to install the devices on 50 additional taxis for people with disabilities this month.

[email protected] Ga-young Choi Reporter