New automotive technologies engineered to reduce pedestrian fatalities on roads will deliver better safety outcomes than the current focus on driver behaviour, say researchers from the University of Sydney.
Associate Professor Martin Tomitsch, Head of the Design Lab at the University of Sydney’s Faculty of Architecture, Design and Planning, and Dr Adrian Ellison, a Research Fellow at the Institute of Transport and Logistics Studies, wrote that while advances in safety systems and technology over the past decades have greatly improved driver and passenger safety, there has been relatively little new technology to ensure the safety of pedestrians.
The safety statistics are stark: every two days, one pedestrian is killed on Australia’s roads, with the majority of fatalities occurring in metropolitan areas. From a global perspective, walking is significantly more dangerous than travelling by car, even though pedestrians and cars are often separated, and walking involves much slower speeds. More than 270,000 pedestrians lose their lives on roads each year around the world, making up 22 per cent of all road traffic deaths.
According to the researchers, from a technology standpoint, even current innovations to improve pedestrian safety are designed from a car-centric approach.
Most improvements in pedestrian safety are byproducts of driver-focused policies such as random breath-testing and speed cameras, but the researchers say such approaches rely too much on driver behaviour, when a significant proportion of drivers are unwilling to change. For example, while NSW has instituted random breath testing for 34 years, 12 per cent of crashes in NSW cities still involve alcohol. Similarly, despite the implementation of speed cameras, 33 per cent fo crashes in cities still involve speeding.
To successfully design technology for pedestrian safety, it will be important to understand human behaviour, they assert. The current focus on updating traffic lights to include countdown timers, for example, may only exacerbate the problem, because they encourage people to run across intersections in an attempt to beat the timer.
According to the researchers, neither the technology nor pedestrians are to blame for this. Rather, the fault lies with the holistic approach to cities and road planning: road safety technology improvements take a car-centric perspective, by prioritising the rapid clearing of the road in order to allow cars to pass.
As urban populations grow, the tension between car-centric planning and technology implementations, and the needs of pedestrian (how long they have to wait to cross the road) will continue to grow, increasing the risk of collision, to the detriment of the pedestrians.
“It must be recognised that pedestrians die due to collisions with vehicles, not each other,” the researchers wrote.
“Any safety solution must consider the way all road users interact with each other and infrastructure.”
An example of effective safety controls include new sensors that automatically stop the vehicle when approaching a pedestrian. With the advent of driverless cars, safety systems that focus on the way people and cars interact will become even more important. And the feedback will need to go both ways: for example, some driverless concept cars have a display behind the windshield that signals to pedestrians that the car sees them.
From a roads and city planning perspective, sensors that collect data about conditions and the movement of people and vehicles are increasingly popular. In 2014, Chicago announced it was installing 40 sensors, with plans for 1,000 over the next few years. In Australia, Melbourne has been installing and testing pedestrian-counting sensors since 2012.
It will be important that this data is processed and acted upon, using algorithms to make sense of the information in order to assist in effective decision making and planning.
The next step will be to find a way to make the data available to pedestrians and road users in real time, to deliver real safety outcomes, like warning drivers and/or pedestrians of an impending collision, or predicting high-risk situations where pedestrians and vehicles may come into contact.