Abstract Manager

The Transport Canada Innovation Centre is monitoring emerging automated vehicle technologies for their potential to help make Canada’s roads the safest in the world. In order to fulfill its regulatory and consumer responsibilities, Transport Canada needs to continuously test and evaluate the performance of automated driving technologies in theCanadian context.

Transport Canada already has a robust testing program in place for automated driving technologies. These testing programs require scenarios, which are sets of realistic conditions and events unfolding around the subject vehicle. The test program then seeks to recreate the scenario to assess the ability of the vehicle’s automated driving technology to safely respond. In order to be useful for testing, a scenario should represent a real-world event and contain dynamic properties of the involved road users such as speed, direction, road user type, and inter-user distance. 

The Transport Canada Innovation Centre has identified a need for additional realistic critical scenarios at four-legged intersections in Canada to support its future testing work.

Microtraffic (now Miovision) was awarded this project in 2023, the primary objective of which was to collect real world scenario data on critical road user interactions at Canadian intersections to support ongoing testing programs and future simulated testing of automated vehicle technologies.

In partnership with the City of Montreal and the City of Calgary, Miovision installed ITS technology across several intersections and collected these near-miss scenarios to deliver them to Transport Canada. 

In this presentation we will cover the project background, including a high level summary of the work that Transport Canada is doing with AV testing, as well as the importance of the data being collected (near miss events, multi-modal volumes, performance measures) and any trends or anomalies that were discovered. We will show that the same data provided to Transport Canada for AV scenario testing can also shape insights for traffic engineers at cities. We will also show how a new continuous safety monitoring tool deployed at the same intersections can collect datasets that are larger and more useful by several orders of magnitude.