ANWB Case Study

Making Dutch roads safer with data

The Royal Dutch Touring Club (ANWB) does so much more than providing roadside assistance to motorists. A big part of their remit is influencing and contributing to the sustainable development of society.

Lobbying to improve the safety of the road network, they were frustrated by the lack of real-time data detailing events building up to a crash.

While crash hotspot data was available, there’s a big difference between knowing that crashes often happen somewhere and understanding the reasons why. Without knowing the causes of accidents, they were unable to make the best possible safety recommendations to local governments and officials.

It was clear to them that the insights they were looking for needed to come from a different source.

Telematics technology that monitors a driver’s behaviour in real-time offered a solution. But this is expensive to set up and would take many years for enough information to be gathered for effective analysis.

Seeking a solution, they approached Howden Driving Data.

With over a decade of insights derived from our telematics and claims data, they could make new connections and insights regarding the causes of crashes and their impact. 

The Royal Dutch Touring Club team set to work reconstructing accidents to identify patterns and, hopefully, discover the causes behind them.

Poring over a vast supply of cases, similarities began to emerge. Hazards that would previously have gone unnoticed revealed themselves; poor visibility at junctions, speed limits too high for the sharpness of bends, poor road design, bumps and irregularities on the road surface.

Now armed with a deep understanding of hazards on the road, the Royal Dutch Touring Club continue to lobby for infrastructure changes to improve road safety. Backed by data, they make recommendations that remove the risk at the source.

Sharing their insights with over 300 local councils, the Royal Dutch Touring Club have successfully implemented road infrastructure changes across the Netherlands that have improved road safety.