21 November, 2011
“Results of a research are critical!
In the region of Utrecht, 50 percent of the fire-brigades are to late at the place of emergency, declares ‘Veiligheidsrisico Utrecht’ (VRU). The aim for the fire-brigade is to be at the place of emergency is within 8 minutes after they get a call.
In 18 percent of the emergencies, they are even more than two minutes to late. The most common causes are the distance between the place of the emergency and the fire department.
VRU thinks that more fire departments won’t help. Fire prevention would help a lot.”
Placing more fire departments is no option, but shortening the delay because of traffic on the route can help!
The route is often inefficient, because of the late reaction of the other traffic and occupied roads. With Smart Emergency, delays because of traffic will decrease. Earlier notifications to the other traffic participants with our blue lighted route system and the use of a routing system that avoids busy ways, will help decrease the delays that emergency services got from the traffic. Also all the traffic lights will turn green whenever the emergency service is approaching. The lights will turn red for the other traffic users.
Lampposts will show a blue light when an emergency service which is in a hurry, is approaching within +/- 1km. When the emergency service is within +/- 100 m of a lamppost on his route to the place of emergency, the lamppost will flash blue light fast to warn the other traffic users, so that they can make place for the emergency service. Also blue lights help, the driver of a emergency service to see more easily where it has to drive to and which route.
The routing system will avoid busy roads and stops all the traffic that crosses the route of the emergency service. With this feature, emergency services can cross roads with traffic lights faster and more safely.
All these features together will make it easier for emergency services to go to the place of emergency and faster.
For this project we did build a prototype. This prototype had a traffic-jam detection system, the blue light routing system and a php-based interface. We were able to guide a firetruck to every part of our prototype city, while avoiding traffic-jams.
