Road transport is one of the most hazardous areas of our everyday life. Scientists all over the world work very hard to help to reduce fatality on the road. Vehicle manufacturers spend a lot of money to make cars safer. Most cars didn’t even had a seatbelts just a few decades ago. But now cars have all kinds of sophisticated safety measures such as air bags, ABS breaking systems, Electronic Stability Programs and etc. All these smart computerized systems were possible to invent due to different areas of physics. “But still, according to statistics 30 000 people die in the car accidents every day in the world”. Some entire industries such as vehicle manufacturers, road construction companies, road safety signs designers and high visibility cloth producers continue scientific researches every day to help in reducing the number of the road accidents with injuries and fatalities.
- According to WHO Road Traffic Injuries, alcohol is the primary cause of accidents. Understanding of laser physics could help scientists to install in vehicles a laser alcohol detector device. There is no car with such device on the road yet. But it is not difficult to invent such device because the technology already exists. I have read about the laser devise which can detect alcohol vapor from a distance. If this device is installed in every car it could automatically shut down the engine or block the wheels if alcohol is detected.
- Second important factor of road traffic injuries is speeding. According to statistics speeding causes majority of the car accidents. To prevent that, radio physicists (who deal with wave processes of different nature such as electromagnetic radiofrequency waves) came up with an interesting idea to introduce an Automatic Speed Reducer (ASP) in every vehicle. Speed limits are normally set in every street or highway. It would be possible to transmit the speed limit electronically by radio waves. While driving through that area vehicle’s ASP devices will receive these signals and automatically brake the car to the maximum allowed speed. If the speed limit can be transmitted automatically it would be possible to change the speed limits according to the weather or road or traffic conditions. For example during the night speed limits could be reduced or when the road is empty during the weekends the speed could be set higher and etc.
In conclusion I want to say that despite the huge amount of dead and injured people nowadays, science, especially physics helped a lot to somewhat reduce everyday car accidents. And I assume that in next 5 or 10 years the amount of car accidents will decrease because physics and technologies progress from day to day.
Cited works
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—. yaplakal. 21 october 2010 r. 14 november 2012 r. <http://www.yaplakal.com/forum1/topic292642.html>.