Relevant factors for active pedestrian safety based on 100 real accident reconstructions

Abstract

The enhancement of pedestrian safety to avoid traffic accidents represents a major challenge. This study allows a better understanding of the issues in pedestrian protection. It highlights the potential of in-depth accident studies for identifying relevant crash parameters in the pedestrian active safety. A computational simulation tool was developed to reconstruct 100 pedestrian real-world crashes. Two of them are detailed to illustrate the methodology.

A description of the complete sample is then presented which highlights the major factors affecting the detection of the pedestrian. These main factors concern the travel and impact speed of the vehicle, the pedestrian trajectory and his walking speed, the scene configuration with obstacles, and the weather conditions. In particular, it has been shown that 1 s before the impact, only 30% of pedestrians are located in front of the car and 90% of them are less than 20 m from the front of the car.

KEYWORDS:

• In-depth investigation
• accident reconstruction
• pedestrian crashes
• active safety

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank the in-depth investigation teams of both CASR (Centre for Automotive Safety Research, The University of Adelaide, Australia) and IFSTTAR-LMA (the Laboratory of accident mechanism analysis of the french institute of science and technology for transport, development and networks, Salon de Provence, France) for their help and cooperation in the reconstruction of the accidents.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.