To live and drive in L.A.: Measurements from a real intervehicular accident alert test

Although the number of accidents that occur on roads is slowly decreasing in time, as both cars and streets become progressively safer, the Statistics of Road Traffic Accidents study from the United Nations reveals that during the last decade every year an average of 150,000 people have lost their lives and 5.5 million have suffered injuries on the roads of western countries. Among the many proposals that have been made, during the years, to combat such phenomenon, an important place is taken by highway accident warning technologies. Such type of system can play an important role, especially in those cities, like Los Angeles, Seoul and Shanghai, specifically designed for cars, more than for human beings. In fact, when an accident occurs on a highway of a city like Los Angeles, it is vital to warn as rapidly as possible all the approaching vehicles, in order to give them the time to stop before crashing on any unexpected obstacle. Recently, an inter-vehicular accident warning system has been devised, theoretically proven to be optimal in terms of bandwidth usage and covered distance. In this paper, we present preliminary results that assess the feasibility of such system. The presented results and measurements were taken from real experiments, performed on Los Angeles freeways and roads in August 2011. To the best of our knowledge, these are the first real experiments of such magnitude performed in a live setting with an inter-vehicular accident warning system.