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Persons with intellectual disabilities (PwIDs) often aspire to more social inclusion by engaging in more community activities but encounter social barriers when traveling independently. Therefore, PwIDs are often accompanied by family members, friends, or volunteers. In order to both support the independent outdoor mobility of PwIDs themselves and reduce the caregivers’ burden, the geographic information system–based application “Viamigo” was developed ( www.viamigo.be ), which allows a personal coach to monitor an individual in real time from a distance. The goal is to teach PwIDs a known individual route that they can accomplish independently while being monitored by a personal coach, caregiver, family member, or friend who is taking care of the individual making the trip. Viamigo determines the location of the user and compares this in time and space within a predetermined range and automatically sends notifications to the coach in case the user deviates from the route, travels at an incorrect speed, or enters or leaves a safe or dangerous zone, among other factors. Besides this on-route functionality, Viamigo also allows the creation of geofences around destinations (to monitor whether the user stays within a predefined zone) and emergency tracking. The initial results are promising: PwIDs successfully used Viamigo for a heterogeneous set of trips performed by several travel modes (bus, cycling, and walking) for several activity purposes (both daily recurrent trips to the day center and trips for shopping, social, and recreational purposes) and for different distances.

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In literature, priority-controlled and right-hand priority intersections have rarely been compared on other elements than the number of right-of-way violations and collisions. This study investigates the effect on speed and lateral position of five priority rules under two visibility conditions at an intersection (without hierarchy between branches), which is, at this moment, a knowledge gap. Fifty participants drove five different routes in a simulator and were exposed to the following manipulations: priority to the right rule applying and indicated (road sign and road sign with road marking), priority to the right rule applying but not indicated (no sign), priority to the right rule not applying and indicated (priority road and priority at next intersection), under good and bad visibility. Results show a significant speed decrease for both situations where the priority to the right rule was indicated compared to situations with no priority to the right rule, especially when visibility was bad. Priority to the right signs with additional road marking resulted in lowest speed under both visibility conditions. For all priority rules, lateral position shifted more towards the middle of the road when visibility was bad. Since speed was higher in case of priority roads or roads with priority at next intersection, it can be concluded that a higher level of control (priority-controlled intersections) does not necessarily result in a traffic safety improvement. Therefore, policy makers should take into account the results of this study and not generally change all the priority to the right intersections by priority-controlled intersections.

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