Volvo Interior Radars to Protect Children & Pets Left Unattended
Technology is expanding to protect the rich. If you can afford to pay about $80,000 US for a new 2025 Volvo EX90 you can be guaranteed that any child or pet left in the interior of your Volvo will be protected by advanced radar sensors. The Detroit Free Press is reporting that Volvo is installing advanced radars that can detect the smallest (just millimeters) movements inside Volvo vehicles and that the vehicle will take action to prevent overheating or hypothermia. When motion is detected the vehicle cannot be locked. The system will turn on the climate control keeping the vehicle at a reasonable temperature until the vehicle’s battery is drained. If potential over-heating is detected the system will unlock the doors and will roll down the windows. It is reported that other manufacturers such as Hyundai and Toyotas will offer less complex systems in some 2025 vehicles.
The Detroit Free Press reported that, since 1998 when records began to be kept, more than 900 children have died in hot vehicles in the U.S. No information is available about how many pets have died.
While this technology may eventually inhabit most vehicles sold in North America will be likely be some time before the average family can be protected for these dreadful outcomes.
London City Transit Bus Loss-Of-Control Collision on Highbury Ave in London Ontario
Local news media reported that a southbound London City Transit bus was involved in a loss-of-control collision on Sunday, August 18, 2024, at approximately 0930 hours, on Highbury Ave north of Hamilton Road in London, Ontario. Several passengers reportedly sustained injuries but none were seriously injured. News media reported that the surface of Highbury Ave was “rain-soaked” at the time of the collision. These facts were of interest to Gorski Consulting since the surface of Highbury Ave was noted to be uneven for a number of years and there has never been a correction to the surface problems. Due to these conditions Gorski Consulting had conducted some testing on October 23, 2019, to provide some objective data on the surface conditions and to compare these to other expressways in southern Ontario. The results were posted in a Gorski Consulting website article on November 29, 2019. Not much interest was shown in those results as demonstrated by the few visitors to the website who actually reviewed the article. Given the occurrence of the present collision we have opted to re-post the original article because it may have some relevance to the cause of the bus collision. The website article is shown in its entirety below, and then we provide some additional comments afterwards.
NEW ROAD SURFACE DATA AVAILABLE FOR HIGHBURY AVE IN LONDON
by Zygmunt | Nov 29, 2019 | Articles, News
On October 23, 2019, Gorski Consulting conducted testing on Highbury Ave between Hamilton Road and Highway 401 in London, Ontario to document the road’s surface conditions. This was done in a manner that has been discussed numerous times on the Gorski Consulting website. It involved the attachment of an iPhone to the structure of a 2007 Buick Allure test vehicle. An App on the iPhone was used to document the longitudinal and lateral motion of the vehicle. Video cameras documented the position of the vehicle along the road including other factors such as the vehicle speed. This article will provide a general description of the testing site, numerical results from the testing and
finally a discussion of how this testing relates to results from other similar
highways in Southern Ontario.
THE SITE
Highbury Ave is the only, four-lane, controlled-access, freeway located in the City of London, Ontario which has a population of about 390,000. This expressway is only about 5 kilometres long. To the south it connects with Highway 401 (MacDonald Cartier Freeway) which is the highest-volume freeway in Canada, stretching from Windsor to border of the Canadian Province of Quebec. To the north the Highbury Ave expressway terminates at Hamilton Road, which is an old arterial roadway that crosses at a diagonal along the south-east quadrant of London. North of Hamilton Road Highbury is no longer a controlled access freeway but a four-lane arterial.
Highbury Ave contains two interchanges, one at Commissioners Road and another at Bradley Ave. It contains some sections of surface that are an asphalt pavement while in other sections it contains a concrete surface.
Highbury Ave contains two interchanges, one at Commissioners Road and another at Bradley Ave. It contains some sections of surface that are an asphalt pavement while in other sections it contains a concrete surface.
Several older features of the Highbury Ave make it less safe than other similar, high-speed freeways. One sub-standard feature involves the lack of additional surface beyond the painted, yellow, edge line, as shown in the example photo below. Several decades ago Highway 401 contained a similar lacking of surface width and this resulted in many loss-of-control collisions as vehicles drifted off the surface edge. Almost all freeways of the current age contain some additional surface width including rumble strips that warn drivers when their vehicle wanders too close to the surface edge.
Tall, non-native grasses have also begun to grow in some sections of the median of Highbury Ave. While some forms of vegetation can be helpful in decelerating a vehicle that has entered a median, not all vegetation is helpful. In this case the tall grasses provide minimal deceleration while also blocking the view of drivers across the median. Vision across a median can provide an additional second or more of warning allowing a driver to detect an opposing vehicle that has entered the median and may be approaching into impact. A second or two of additional warning can be an important difference in avoiding a collision or reducing its severity.
These are some examples of deficiencies that plague many old freeways that have not been upgraded. The City of London is expecting to conduct a re-surfacing of Highbury Ave, likely in 2021, however it is unclear what corrections will be made to improve its substandard conditions beyond its surface.
The need for an improved surface is exemplified in the results of the Gorski Consulting surface testing that was conducted on October 23, 2019.
THE TESTING RESULTS
Five test runs were conducted on Highbury Ave on October 23, 2019. Each of the five tests commenced from the intersection at Hamilton Road and progressed southward past the Highway 401 interchange. Then the test vehicle was turned around and the testing was continued northward back to the Hamilton Road intersection. The intention was to conduct the five tests at increasing speeds, from 80 to 120 km/h.
Unfortunately, due to the traffic volume, interference by traffic prevented a steady speed and in many instances the test vehicle’s position had to be changed from the right lane to the left lane and back again. These changes in speed and lane position had some effects on the data making it more difficult to compare the results from one test to the other. Never-the-less some interesting results were obtained. The following five figures provide the results from the five tests.
In the past we have attempted to make it easier for readers to differentiate between “good” and “bad” road surfaces by colour coding the values. Thus green coloured values, below 0.0200 indicate good road surfaces. Black coloured values, between 0.0200 and 0.0500, indicate acceptable surfaces that will likely contain local problems. Red coloured values, above 0.0500, indicate there are likely major problems with the road surface. An exception has been made in the above table to reflect the observation that it is important for high speed expressways to contain a higher level of service, less vehicle motion and therefore lower values of rotation. Thus in the above table several values have been coded in red wherever they rise substantially above the norm for what would be expected for expressways. This is to note that any expressway with a value greater than 0.0500 must be considered of greater concern than a similar value on a lower speed road with less traffic volume.
DISCUSSION
Without some background to the meaning of the data the significance of the posted results can be lost. Yet it is a challenge to review the background without going into a long and detailed discussion. So, the following will be an abbreviated background which will likely require readers to look at some of the previously posted articles dealing with the Road Data datafile.
In brief, the columns in the above figures labelled “Lateral Rotation” and “Longitudinal Rotation” provide an indication of how the body of the test vehicle was moved, bounced or rotated as a result of its travel over the road surface for the time period of 30 seconds. If the test vehicle was travelling at 90 km/h that would translate to 25 metres every second. So in 30 seconds the vehicle would travel about 750 metres or 3/4 of a kilometre. So the posted number of 0.0400 provides the average rate of rotation of the vehicle body over that time and distance. The number is displayed in radians per second. One radian is equal to 57.3 degrees.
Let us look at an example where the lateral rotation is noted as 0.0400. If we multiply 0.0400 by 57.3 we obtain 2.29 degrees. So this value says that, during the noted time segment of 30 seconds, the average deviation, from a level, non-rotating position, of the body of the test vehicle was 0.0400 radians or 2.29 degrees per second. Lateral rotation refers to the motion that occurs if we were to grab a hold of the door frame and began rocking the vehicle back and forth sideways. This motion is referred to “rotation about the longitudinal axis” of the vehicle because the longitudinal axis is the line that passes through the centre of the vehicle from the front license plate to the rear license plate. This sounds odd because we are talking about something “longitudinal” when we are referring to a lateral motion. But this is the technical description of what we mean by lateral rotation. Now, because we are talking about an “average”, or standard deviation, this means that individual deviations within that average could be quite different from that average. Thus, for example, if our test vehicle runs over a length of 1 metre of uneven surface this might cause a major upheaval in the vehicle’s motion during that short time period. And we would not detect that short but huge spike unless we looked more closely at the graphing of the rotation.
An example of this is shown below. This figure shows the Longitudinal (blue) and Lateral (Red) Rotations of the test vehicle in Run #1 as the vehicle was northbound and passed by the Commissioners Road overpass while travelling in the right lane. Most of the data is clustered within the range of 0.1000 to -0.1000 radians per second yet we can observe several large “spikes” in the Lateral Rotation. At least one of the spikes in the middle of the graph rises above 0.5000 radians per second.
It would be of interest to find out what specific portions of the road surface caused these spikes and this can be done with considerable accuracy because of the multiple video cameras that are attached to the test vehicle and these cameras are synchronized to the iPhone App which senses these motions.
Yet it needs to be kept in mind that the spikes occur over a very short time frame of just fractions of a second and that matters. If the motion occurs for just fraction of a second then although the rate of rotation might be very high it does not correspond to a large rotation. We would be more interested in those spikes where there are high rates of rotation but also when they exist for several samples in succession. This would mean that not only did we have a right rate of rotation but the longer time of that high rate means that the vehicle’s body actually rotated to a greater angle.
We have also mentioned in previous articles that we acknowledge use of the 2007 Buick Allure test vehicle means that the results may only be valid for that test vehicle. In other words the use of a different vehicle may result in different data and that difference could be important. There are many agencies that use specialized equipment to plot the smoothness of a road surface and because this equipment is somewhat standardized the data is comparable from one dataset to the next. While this is useful for agencies that need to evaluate matters such as wear of a surface and timing of surface maintenance those are not the same needs as ours. Our interest is in documenting how road surfaces affect the motion and therefore the stability of a typical vehicle that drives on the surface. We only need to know how our road data compares to other road data from other roads. While it may be interesting to compare the data obtained using a different vehicle that is not essential for our purposes.
A substantial amount of data has now been obtained from a variety of testing over the past 5 to 6 years. The Road Data datafile on this Gorski Consulting website now contains tested roadways from many parts of parts of Southwestern Ontario and several counties. It also contains data from expressways that are similar to Highbury Ave. We can now look at the data from several of these expressways and see how Highbury Ave compares. The table below provides a summary of testing that has been conducted just this year on these expressways.
This table enables a general comparison of the road surface conditions of these major expressways in relation to each other. It can be seen that, overall, the Lincoln Alexander Parkway in Hamilton and Highbury Ave contain the worst road surface conditions.
Update To November 29, 2019 Website Article
The above article was posted to describe conditions throughout the length of Highbury Ave from Hamilton Road to Highway 401. It was not focused on the specific location where the collision occurred with the London Transit bus. In the last figure of the above article, and in the last paragraph it was emphasized that the full length of Highbury Ave was in worse condition than other expressways in Ontario. What was not emphasized is that the specific area through which the Transit Bus travelled before crashing was much worse than the rest of the length of Highbury Ave where testing was conducted.
When looking at the data from the five tests we can look at the lateral rotation numbers along the road segment where the test vehicle travelled south of the Thames River bridge, and these numbers are repeated below:
Run #1 = 0.0397
Run #2 = 0.0362
Run #3 = 0.0417
Run #4 = 0.0417
Run #5 = 0.0403
Each of the above numbers represents a travel distance of about 900 metres. Clearly they indicate that the lateral rotation of the test vehicle was much higher in this area than along any other part of Highbury Ave and much higher than any of the data shown for other expressways in southern Ontario. The London Transit bus would have been travelling through this portion of Highbury when the loss-of-control event began. And nothing has been done to the surface of Highbury in this segment since the testing done on October 23, 2019.
The inconvenient reality is that the data shown here has been basically ignored. It has been available but no one has taken any notice of it. Thousands upon thousands of vehicles have passed over this area and experienced the disturbances but the unique circumstances which lead to a loss-of-control were not met. But at 0930 hours of Sunday, April 18th, 2024 there were intermittent periods of heavy rain which would start and then stop again. The road surface became drenched and the tire force that kept vehicles under control was lost. There has been no information provided about the specifics of the Transit Bus crash and therefore a final determination of its cause cannot be made. And this is often the case because those who had direct access the information, such as the London City Police, rarely provide a public accounting of what they have found.
Warning From Ontario Hospital of Spike in E-Bike & E-Scooter Injuries
Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children has produced a news release on their website warning of the recent increase in children’s injuries from riding E-scooters and E-bikes. They report that their emergency department has seen 16 injuries in June and July of 2024 compared with only five incidents in the same period in 2023. While these numbers do not appear to be staggering they demonstrate the concern that hospital medical personnel possess since they are the only ones to see what is happening. Data from sources such as police reports grossly underestimate the number of such incidents since, very often, a police report is not filed unless the incident involves a collision with a motor vehicle.
Similar warnings were presented in the spring of 2024 by Toronto researchers in a study entitled “Comparison of the number of pedestrian and cyclist injuries captured in police data compared with health service utilisation data in Toronto, Canada 2016– 2021”. This study reported that, while 2,362 cyclist incidents were reported in Toronto’s police data, there were 30,101 cyclist visits to hospital emergency departments and 2,299 resulted in hospitalizations. The research also noted that 26,083 of those cyclist incidents, or 87%, did not result from cyclist involvement with a motor vehicle.
Solutions aimed at reducing injuries to vulnerable persons fail to recognize that a thorough documentation and understanding of how collisions occur are a fundamental ingredient in developing a proper plan. Many express the opinion that the problem is obvious while not explaining the basis for those opinions. In London, Ontario there is essentially no documentation of cyclists or riders of e-devices except through independent and unsupported research such as what is done at Gorski Consulting.
Yaw Marks Precede Almost Every Vehicle Loss of Control Rollover
The public is provided with little education regarding how motor vehicle collisions occur and what could injure or kill them. Every day there are numerous postings by police and news media about the latest significant injury or death yet scant information is provided about the details. The result is that needless collisions keep re-occurring, in very similar scenarios, without any meaningful intervention. The public need not know the details of interpreting physical evidence for collision reconstruction however very basic interpretation skills can progress to a progressively better understanding.
So, for this present article we focus on the general evidence found in a simple, single vehicle rollover. This discussion was spurred by the recent Twitter (X) posting by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) of a single photo (reproduced above) of a vehicle rollover along Highway 401 in Ontario.
The above photo shows a very common result of a vehicle rotating out-of-control into a roadside embankment and then rolling over. A gouge in the earth can be seen where the vehicle struck that embankment and preceding that gouge are a set of converging tire marks visible in the grass and on the asphalt shoulder.
Below we see the same photo with some added descriptions of the evidence.
In almost very scenario of a vehicle loss-of-control and subsequent rollover the vehicle enters into a rotation about its vertical centre-of-gravity, or yaw. Yaw rotation is what happens if you were to pierce the roof a vehicle with a rod downward toward the ground and then rotate the vehicle about that rod. Some common descriptions of this rotation are “fish-tailing” or “drifting”. Newer technology exists in almost all modern light-duty vehicles to prevent this rotation because of its undesirable injury consequences. Thus Electronic Stability Control (ESC) and its derivatives uses automatic adjustments to the braking and acceleration of individual wheels to keep a vehicle travelling straight in the direction it is travelling. So one would think that the frequency of the results shown in the above photo should be diminished over time.
So the tire marks in the above photos are yaw marks. But how do we know? The area of the blue circle in the above photo shows a typical characteristic of yaw marks in that they contain striations that often run diagonally with respect to the length of the tire mark. These striations are caused when the tire is rotating while also sliding sideways. Investigators can often look at the change in angle of these striations to determine if a vehicle has been braked or accelerated while producing these marks. If one were to move backwards from this photo and one were to see a longer length of these yaw marks one would see that they would be arced as the vehicle changes direction and is slowed as it travels to the roadside.
Another very common characteristic of pre-crash yaw marks is that they demonstrate the angle of the vehicle as it moves through the site. This angle is identified by the divergence and convergence of the tire marks. When a vehicle is travelling straight ahead without rotation the rear tires follow the path of the front tires. But as yaw begins the rear tires begin to follow a different path from the front tires. This divergence shows the initiation of the yaw rotation. As the rotation progresses the vehicle reaches a point where it is sliding sideways and on approach to this sideways position the tire marks converge: the left-front converges onto the right-front and the left-rear converges with the right rear. So when we see that this convergence reaches a point where only two tire marks are visible we know that the vehicle has reached a point where it is sliding sideways. So in the above photo we see that the vehicle is in an advanced stage of rotation because the tire marks have converged so much they the four tire marks have almost come down to just two. We leave this discussion now for fear of losing the readers’ attention with too many details.
In summary, almost all instances of vehicle loss-of-control rollover result in some form yaw rotation that is very often evidenced by visible yaw tire marks. These tire marks have very distinctive characteristics. Much like all physical evidence in a motor vehicle collision a detailed focus on the characteristics of the evidence can help to explain what transpired even when persons reporting the “facts” do not provide an accurate description of what occurred.
Painted Cycling Lane Safety: Theory Versus Reality
Opinions about cyclist safety in urban environments are not always helpful when based on theoretical studies that do not consider the specifics of the urban area where cycling improvements are considered. Cyclist observations conducted by Gorski Consulting enable a study of the specifics of cycling safety problems in cities such as London, Ontario that are more relevant because they are specific.
The photo at the top of this article is one in a series showing an example of a cycling safety problem in London that is not particularly uncommon, yet rarely are such incidents discussed in formal research studies. In this incident a cyclist is riding westbound within a painted cycling lane on a day when the city’s garbage collection is taking place on this particular street. Thus all the garbage receptacles are seen lying on the roadside, close to the curb. This is a typical, two-lane collector road so that traffic is moderately dense. As the above photo shows, several passenger vehicles are travelling along the roadway and passing the cyclist travelling in the cycling lane.
As shown in the photo below, the cyclist’s position is closer than normal to the white, dividing line between the cycling lane and the lane designated for motor vehicle traffic. This is because the cyclist is pulling a grocery cart with his right hand and needs the additional width for the passage of the cart.
As shown below the cyclist begins to move to the left, outside of the cycling lane, just as a silver car is passing his location. The motor vehicle driver has anticipated this motion and has steered the car beyond the centre-line of the road and partly into the opposing lane. Fortunately there is no motor vehicle traffic in the opposing lane so this lateral motion can be accomplished without much concern. From the motor vehicle driver’s point of view it might seem that the cyclist has been unusually lacking in attention in not keeping properly within the cycling lane. What lies ahead of the cyclist may not be visible because the cycling lane in front of the cyclist is blocked by the cycle and cart.
As the scenario unfolds in the next photo below we see why the cyclist has moved out if the cycling lane because a garbage receptacle is lying within the cycling lane and he must travel around it.
The final photo below shows the cyclist steering back into the cycling lane after he has successfully cleared the obstacle.
Observations like this lead to several issues. If the cyclist had been equipped with a mirror he might have a better opportunity to observe motor vehicle traffic behind him. He might also consider pulling out of the cycling lane in a more gradual fashion thereby giving motor vehicle drivers more time to consider their options. We can also see that the cyclist is not wearing a helmet thus increasing the risk of a major head injury from contact by the motor vehicle or from falling onto the pavement if a glancing contact were to occur.
Cyclists pulling shopping carts is not an uncommon happening in London Ontario yet no recognition of this activity is demonstrated in official circles. Dangers cannot be detected and solutions cannot be found when such happenings are invisible to all concerned.
The issue of obstacles ending up within a cycling lane is also not uncommon. More focus could be drawn to making sure garbage pick-up crews properly return receptacles back onto the roadside and out of a cycling lane. However there are many instances where heavier winds simply blow an empty cycling receptacle into a cycling lane or onto a lane travelled by motor vehicles. These problems need to be acknowledged and solutions need to be discussed.
The scenario shown here is an example of the importance of making observations of cycling scenarios on urban roadways so that an understanding can be gained of what unique safety problems may exist within a community. Safety solutions that are recommended from theoretical studies developed from distant areas (countries) may not fit a specific community’s needs if the unique characteristics of that community’s road systems are not properly identified and understood.
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