What if there were an automobile that securely protected its driver and passengers in case of a car crash or a traffic accident? The students of the International School "Istochnik" came up with the idea of designing the safety car of the future.
The ideas
The aim of our project was to first identify the factors that influenced road safety. The project is multipurposed and has two main dimensions: car safety; road conditions and infrastructure.
The first dimension’s goals are:
• to study engineering features and specifications of Renault car models;
• to design construction changes to the chosen car model in order to improve safety;
The second dimension’s goals are
• to identify safety factors;
• to find out the significance of each factor for traffic safety;
• to suggest solutions to improve road safety;
• to study the road surface of the access route to our school;
• to develop measures and take steps to educate schoolchildren on “Pedestrian Safety”;
• to study the influence of automobiles on the environmental safety in the school territory.
A special place in the safeguarding of roads belongs to road conditions, i.e. its transportation and operational features. The total ratio of road traffic accidents due to bad road conditions has increased up to 20% in our area. The most frequent reasons for such incidents are surface conditions, road unevenness and other factors dependent on the level of road maintenance.
One can get to our school along two streets - Tsentralnaya and Lesnaya.
Both of them have no sidewalks and are in terrible condition. We carried out an investigation and found out that on average there were 30 potholes of different sizes with approximately 1 sq. m in area and 10 cm deep!
According to the statistics from the State Traffic Safety Inspectorate for the current year, pedestrians are often hit at pedestrian crossings.
In autumn, the situation can get even worse: the average time of sunlight decreases, weather conditions worsen, and pedestrians wear darker colors.
Some cases occur only because drivers simply do not notice pedestrian crossings.
Such incidents often occur in scantily lighted streets where a pedestrian crossing is nearly invisible.
During our study, the action group of our school figured that road safety was one of the most important influencing aspects of the roads and characterized the functional reliability of the system “driver – automobile – road – environment”.
Thus, we set up a goal to identify the safest car by analyzing crash tests and comparing the technical data of Renault car models.
After the research we concluded that the Renault Megane was the safest car in the Renault family.
The initiatives
Dimension 1
Our student team suggested that in order to enhance the safety of the car we should:
1. Design a new upgraded cabin
2. Design a universal airbag
3. Replace the fixed cabin with a movable platform for improving safety at the moment of a frontal crash (maximum safety in a frontal hit is achieved through the pivotal gear).
When one jumps down from a high altitude, the force of the blow should be distributed among the entire body through a roll forward in order to soften the force of the blow. A similar effect has been achieved through our invention – when collision is unavoidable, a special mechanism starts rotating the cabin clockwise or vice-versa depending of the direction of the hit and the entourage.
Dimension 2
To avoid pedestrians being hit, lights with motion sensors should be installed at edges of pedestrian crossing to illuminate them at the moment a pedestrian approaches. The driver will see both a pedestrian crossing and the pedestrian, and the pedestrian will see the road ahead.
The data and results of our research will be sent in a mass petition both to the Ulyanovsk prosecutor's office and the Ministry of Roads and Transportation for the roads reconstruction project planned for the near future.
Taking into consideration the significance of the research and the perspective outcomes of our multipurpose project, our intention and plan for the future academic year of 2017/2018 are:
More intensive studies of other factors affecting road safety and the school area’s ecological situation are going to be conducted. We intend to further improve "A safety car of the future". "Students’ safe thinking" is expected to be continued.
