From policy and planning to education and enforcement, there are many ways to reduce the number of road traffic fatalities and serious injuries, more than half of which involve people not in cars.  Martin Kahl, CTO at FISITA, looks at the role of intelligent safety technology in saving lives on the road to Vision Zero. 

With over a million deaths on the roads globally each year, eliminating fatalities and serious injuries from road traffic incidents seems like a utopian ideal. But many of those crashes are avoidable, and so too are many of those deaths and injuries, over half of which involve so-called vulnerable road users (VRUs). The challenge for automakers and suppliers is to identify how intelligent safety technology can be deployed to protect VRUs. 

The leading killer of young people  

From small things, big things one day come, and contemporary road safety thinking started out small: “What about zero?” That was the ambitious traffic fatalities target suggested by Swedish road safety specialist Claes Tingvall in a conversation with his country’s minister for infrastructure in the mid-1990s.  

That conversation ultimately resulted in Vision Zero, the safe systems approach that brings together all stakeholders in road transportation and traffic safety. That means not just vehicle manufacturers and suppliers, but also government agencies, law enforcement, and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) such as road safety groups; it also includes public transport authorities and urban planners, the media, and of course the general public, working together towards one ‘simple’ goal: to eliminate traffic fatalities and severe injuries through policies, safety technologies, road and vehicle design, and public awareness initiatives. 

In 2023, the WHO noted that the annual number of road traffic deaths globally had fallen slightly. Good news, until you learn that the number it has fallen “slightly” to is a still staggering 1.19 million deaths per year

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), more than two deaths occur every minute on the world’s roads. That equates to over 3,200 deaths per day, making road traffic crashes the leading killer of children and people between five and 29 years old.  

Were death from road traffic incidents caused by a disease, the world’s scientists would have been scrambled and a vaccine would have sent it the way of polio. In the absence of a vaccine, zero is arguably the only target we can and should all work towards—but there’s a long way to go; in 2023, the WHO noted that the annual number of road traffic deaths globally had fallen slightly. Good news, until you learn that the number it has fallen “slightly” to is a still staggering 1.19 million deaths per year. 

That number is even more disturbing when you look at where most of those deaths occur; low- and middle-income countries account for 90 percent of road traffic fatalities. 

The WHO data also highlights another shocking number: 53. That’s the percentage of people killed in road traffic incidents that are vulnerable road users (VRUs). Put differently, 630,700 people not in cars die on the road each year, including pedestrians (23 percent), motorcyclists (two- and three-wheelers, 21 percent), cyclists (six percent), and micro-mobility riders (three percent). 

Remi Bastien, Strategic Advisor to the CEO at FISITA, recently gave a presentation to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), the UN specialised agency for digital technology. Bastien explained that although the rate of VRU deaths is higher in cities than elsewhere, the number of VRU deaths is two-and-a-half times higher in rural and extra-urban areas, accounting for a third of the total. Thanks to improvements in vehicle technology, he noted, the number of fatalities per 100,000 vehicles has fallen by 38 percent over the last ten years; however, the rise in the number of vehicles on the road means the true number of fatalities has remained largely unchanged over the same period. 

Testing times 

In 2023, vehicle safety rating body Euro NCAP introduced new active safety test protocols to assess a vehicle’s ability to prevent or minimise a crash, with a focus on the use and performance of intelligent safety technology such as radar and lidar for VRU protection. 

Critically, technology can’t do everything, but everything it can do is critical, with passive safety technology protecting vehicle occupants and other road users, and active safety technologies helping to prevent the crash, or prepare the vehicle for impact if a collision is unavoidable

And in 2024, Euro NCAP revealed details of its new Truck Safe rating scheme, because although heavy trucks account for around just three percent of vehicles on Europe’s roads, they are involved in 50 percent of all fatal and serious injury crashes, and crashes involving trucks and VRUs currently account for 25 percent of all EU road traffic fatalities. Euro NCAP believes a third of all heavy truck-to-pedestrian crashes could be prevented if all trucks were fitted with automatic emergency braking (AEB) systems that can detect pedestrians, cyclists, and micromobility users. 

Vision Zero 

And so we return to Vision Zero, a now globally recognised initiative which seeks to eliminate all road traffic fatalities and severe injuries, by treating them as preventable tragedies that can be addressed through improved urban design and transportation policy. Vision Zero calls for commitment from all stakeholders: from urban planners critically evaluating the use of intersections, road layouts, speed management, pedestrianisation, and the promotion of public transport; to policy makers and regulators considering the rules and boundaries for human behaviour and vehicle capabilities; education teaching people about those boundaries and why they’re there; and law enforcement doing more to prevent people breaching those boundaries, and intervening when they do. 

Having ticked off infrastructure planning, policy and regulation, education, and law enforcement, we’re left with intelligent vehicle safety technology. Critically, technology can’t do everything, but everything it can do is critical, with passive safety technology such as airbags, seatbelts, and pop-up hoods protecting vehicle occupants and other road users in the event of a crash, and increasingly capable active safety technologies helping to prevent the crash, or prepare the vehicle for impact if a collision is unavoidable. 

In recent years, there have been some milestone intelligent safety technology introductions. AEB is one of the most important safety advances of recent years, according to automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research, which puts it on a par with the introduction of seatbelts.​ AEB alerts the driver to a suspected imminent crash, and if the driver fails to take action, AEB technology will apply the brakes hard to avoid a crash, or at least lessen its severity.​

DMS technology is becoming a critical component of mainstream vehicle safety system architecture, monitoring drivers to ensure they remain focused on the task of driving: eyes on the road, hands on the wheel

Electronic stability control (ESC), also known as rollover protection, seeks to keep the vehicle balanced in events that could cause the driver to lose control.​ And new EU-mandated intelligent speed assistance (ISA) systems warn drivers of high speeds or automatically reduce vehicle speeds in specific areas. 

Reverse cameras are now mandatory on all new cars in the US, cutting out 90% of a vehicle’s blind spot and doing much to prevent the tragic ‘backover’ incidents that far too frequently involve children. 

And technology is being developed to address ‘dooring’, wherein drivers or passengers inadvertently open their doors into the path of an oncoming cyclist. Cameras in mirrors, reverse cameras, and blind spot detection systems can detect oncoming bicycles and prevent doors being opened—a great example of technology doing the dirty work, despite the existence of much simpler solutions, such as the #TeachTheReach campaign that saw the ‘Dutch Reach’ written into the UK Highway Code in 2022. 

Everything, everywhere… 

Of course, protection of VRUs around the vehicle begins inside the vehicle and behind the steering wheel. Driver monitoring systems (DMS) using AI cameras on the steering column or rear-view mirror can detect fatigue and distraction, and alert the driver with audible warning sounds, steering wheel or seat vibration, and visual warnings such as a flashing light.  

Initially developed in the mining industry, and then in automated driving applications to ensure human driver readiness to take back vehicle control, DMS technology is becoming a critical component of mainstream vehicle safety system architecture, monitoring drivers to ensure they remain focused on the task of driving: eyes on the road, hands on the wheel. 

Vision Zero is certainly ambitious. But ask anyone who’s ever been involved in a crash what the target should be; ask any bereaved family; ask any first responder; ask any VRU… It’s hard to imagine them suggesting anything other than zero

With everything on the road connected to everything around it, there’s a major opportunity to leverage vehicle-to-everything (V2X) connectivity to enhance VRU safety and it is here that the automotive industry must turn to the telcos. By leveraging 5G and multi-access edge computing (MEC) with technology on surrounding vehicles and infrastructure, combined with GPS and mapping, connectivity can make drivers and other road users better aware of each other and alert them to specific events or incidents.  

The question is, can telcos provide the degree of accuracy in the “X2V” aspect of V2X that the automakers require? Dialogue between the automotive industry and the telecoms industry is critical, and to that end, FISITA is a co-chair of the aforementioned UN ITU expert group looking at three specific topics: vehicular communications for merging automatically into congested lanes; technical and economic sustainability for vehicular communications; and vehicular communications for advanced emergency braking to protect VRUs.

And the use of intelligent safety systems to protect VRUs is also the current focus of FISITA’s expert working group on intelligent safety. Led by Armin Karle of Bosch and Dr Guenther Prokop from TU Dresden, the FISITA Intelligent Safety Working Group’s mission is to harness the expertise of the FISITA community to effectively deploy intelligent safety systems in the quest to eliminate road traffic fatalities and severe injuries. Working collaboratively, this working group is producing a white paper on the subject, to be presented at the 2025 FISITA World Mobility Conference. 

Zero ambition? 

So, what about that target of zero? Vision Zero is certainly ambitious, and it’s difficult to see it being achieved any time soon—but ask anyone who’s ever been involved in a crash what the target should be; ask any bereaved family; ask any first responder; ask any VRU… It’s hard to imagine them suggesting anything other than zero.