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Bicycles And E-scooters Are Safer With V2X

Published May 6, 2022

Commsignia is strengthening road safety by integrating micromobility, pedestrians and vehicles into smart cities through vehicle-to-everything (V2X) technologies. V2X is the umbrella term for communication solutions that enable road users to see each other, even when they are not clearly visible.

The main cause of bicycle crashes:
drivers don’t see them

Over 75 percent of bicycle road fatalities happen because drives just don’t see smaller vehicles. On-board car sensors help a lot to cover blind spots, but under certain conditions the warnings come late. V2X not only provides a real-time data flow between traffic participants in a wider area, but this technology has the added benefit of seeing through walls.

Users of V2X communicate directly with each other

  • No network coverage is needed for road safety applications
  • Anonymized identifiers ensure data privacy
  • Messages contain essential traffic information such as position, heading and speed of road users

Contextual awareness increases confidence and improves the user experience of micromobility services. V2X safety applications give riders time to prepare for an unexpected situation.

  • vehicle behind’, 
  • ‘hidden vehicle approaching behind the corner’ 

V2X works both ways, providing vehicle drivers alerts about micromobility riders in their blind spot, so they can avoid right and left cross crashes or door hits.

Dedicated for road safety

V2X works on the 5.9 GHz radio frequency, an open band that is dedicated for road safety applications. Commsignia’s provides the necessary IoT hardware and software components to enable V2X on vehicles.

We can also make it possible for unconnected users to be part of the V2X world. Hundreds of smart sensors and cameras installed by cities identify cars, e-scooters, bicycles and pedestrians in the traffic, and Commsignia’s roadside units can generate V2X warnings based on these detections. V2X-enabled vehicles can also receive these notifications. 

Cities are increasingly open to the use of V2X. There’s a wide range of applications at their disposal, such as the ability to adjust traffic lights by detecting vehicles. But the V2X ecosystem have a much greater potential. Vehicle data will help improve the road network in a unique way: fine details such as frequent braking of cars near micromobility road users indicate near-miss incidents which could lead to collisions in heavy traffic, but road managers can intervene before they happen.

Commsignia has been building the V2X ecosystem for more than 10 years with deployments throughout the US and Europe, and OEM deals will bring V2X technologies to millions of cars in the coming years.