CINCINNATI (WXIX) – A new piece of technology has been designed to help keep drivers and passengers safe from the dangers of wrong-way crashes.
Flashing lights and “wrong way” signage at exit ramps on the highway are a proactive measure to preventing wrong-way drivers, but so much of stopping these types of wrecks is reactive because when someone gets on the interstate going the wrong way, every second matters.
The impact of these crashes is often head-on and for those who have survived these crashes, many, like Morgan Story, are left with long-lasting injuries.
“She had multiple fractures in her hip, her leg, her arm, there was a brain bleed that happened,” Richard Wimmer says of Story’s injuries.
Story, the mother of Wimmer’s children, is still on the road to recovery almost eight months after she was hit by a wrong-way driver on March 20.
“From what the doctors are saying, it could be up to two years of her being in the hospital,” Wimmer explained.
The driver who hit Story on Ronald Reagan Highway near Hamilton Avenue died, according to the Springfield Township Police Department.
Police said 80-year-old Walter Johnson was not on the highway for long before the crash and the calls officers got happened after impact.
There was no opportunity to warn Story of the danger headed her way, but that’s not the case with every wrong-way crash.
The Ohio Department of Transportation (ODOT) has smart cameras that monitor the state’s major roadways, intersections and interstates.
“The system can detect vehicles, motorcycles, even foreign objects, large foreign objects moving at a high velocity or a slow pace the wrong way,” Lewis Stallworth explains.
Stallworth works for Bosch, which is a global technology and services company.
Bosch’s cameras and wrong-way detection software have been monitoring Ohio and Kentucky roadways for a decade.
If that system spots a wrong-way driver, red flags start to go up.
“It then sends an alert to both the TMC, the Traffic Management Center, for those images and that video to pop up on the screen so it can be monitored, but it also has the capability to send a real-time alert to both law enforcement and the public at large,” Stallworth says.
ODOT does not have cameras on every stretch of highway across the state, so that leaves some gaps.
Bosch hopes to fill those gaps by offering applications that can be downloaded to your car or smartphone that track the direction of travel of anyone who has downloaded the technology.
“Once every second, as you approach the highway entrance ramp, we start pinging the cloud, once per second, that way we can compare your direction of travel with the correct direction of travel,” Elizabeth Kao explains.
Kao, who is also with Bosch, says they have rolled this software out with European car manufacturers, and it allows them to send warnings and alerts based on your specific location and the road you are driving on.
In 2022, Bosch says they warned 600 people they were going in the wrong direction. They also warned 6,000 people that a wrong-way driver was headed their way and said not a single person who got the warning was involved in a crash.
Bosch says they are now working with multiple car manufacturers in the United States to bring the technology into your dashboard.
“Realistically, we could work with car makers and have this out next year, in 2025,” Kao says. ”Again, it’s not that difficult to do with car makers because it doesn’t require extra hardware. The software is something that we can work with car makers to put into their vehicles and then we turn on the service.”
Bosch says they also offer this technology for free to app developers who want to include it in their apps.
There is one app developer who has taken them up on that. The app is called Sygic.
When we are talking about new technology, there is always concern about what information it is tracking.
Bosch says the tech will track your location and direction of travel in relation to on and off-ramps.
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