EG-ARSA: An Expert-Grounded Open Model for Visual Road Safety Auditing in Low-Resource Settings

Road traffic injuries remain a major challenge in low- and middle-income countries, where proactive road safety auditing is limited by incomplete crash records, shortages of qualified auditors, and the high cost of large-scale field inspections. To address this problem, we propose Expert-Grounded Distillation (EGD), a novel artificial intelligence framework that transfers institutional road safety expertise into a compact vision-language model for scalable visual road safety auditing. The key innovation is a quantified expert-grounding stage in which the teacher vision-language model is calibrated against authoritative field audits. Large-scale annotation is permitted only after the teacher reaches substantial agreement with expert risk assessments (Cohen's kappa = 0.74). The calibrated teacher then generates structured supervision that is distilled into an 8-billion-parameter student vision-language model using Low-Rank Adaptation and a single leakage-free prompt. We also introduce Bangladesh Road Safety Audit (BD-ARSA), the first open, expert-grounded Bangladeshi visual road safety audit dataset containing 21,947 image-audit records with near-national coverage, and Expert-Grounded Road Safety Auditor (EG-ARSA), the first vision-language model developed specifically for this task. Experimental results show that grounded fine-tuning substantially improves ordinal risk assessment over the zero-shot baseline, while blind expert evaluation demonstrates that the compact student outperforms both its 31 billion-parameter teacher and Gemini-2.5-Flash. These findings demonstrate that EGD provides an effective and scalable engineering solution for proactive road safety auditing in resource-constrained environments.

Proactive Road Safety Intervention in Australia: Predicting Risky Driving Hotspots from Connected Vehicle Data

Road safety monitoring has historically been reactive, relying on crash-record analysis after fatalities and injuries have already occurred. Proactive identification of high-risk locations and dangerous driving behaviour before incidents occur is a critical but underexplored challenge. This paper addresses this gap using connected vehicle telemetry data from Greater Sydney, Australia, to detect and forecast near-miss risky driving events at the Local Government Area (LGA) level. Risky driving is quantified through g-force thresholds (hard braking >0.6g, harsh cornering >0.47g, harsh acceleration >0.5g), and spatio-temporal heatmaps are constructed to identify high-risk zones. Eight predictive models are benchmarked across three families: ensemble learning (Random Forests, XGBoost, LightGBM), deep learning (LSTM, N-BEATS), and classical time-series methods (ARIMA, Exponential Smoothing, Prophet). ARIMA achieves the lowest mean absolute error (MAE: 162.21), performing comparably to LSTM (MAE: 163.92) and outperforming all ensemble methods, with N-BEATS reaching an MAE of 180.75. These results demonstrate that parsimonious time-series models are competitive with deep learning approaches when training data volume is limited. The study highlights the potential of IoT-based connected vehicle data to support proactive road safety interventions, with Sydney's inner and western LGAs (CBD, Parramatta, Bankstown) identified as persistent high-risk zones warranting targeted policy action.

Enhancing Road Safety: An IoT-Based Accident Detection and Prevention Mechanism

Road traffic accidents remain a critical global crisis, consistently serving as a primary driver of preventable mortality and severe injury. These incidents are frequently precipitated by human error, including overspeeding, driving under the influence of alcohol, and cognitive fatigue. To address this urgent public safety challenge, this paper presents an intelligent, Internet of Things (IoT)-based Accident Prevention and Detection System (APDS) designed to systematically mitigate driver risk and optimize post-collision emergency responses. The proposed framework features a multi-tiered architecture capable of executing continuous real-time telemetry monitoring, proactive local alarm triggering, and automated situational intervention. Furthermore, the system integrates automated emergency communication protocols that aggregate immediate spatial coordinates via GPS and dispatch targeted alerts to medical facilities in close proximity, thereby optimizing response times and reducing accident-related fatalities.