What We Learned During Pedestrian Safety Month

This year our friends at the United States Department of Transportation designated October as Pedestrian Safety Month, so we took the opportunity to focus on how automated vehicles can help improve the safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs, a common collective term for pedestrians, cyclists and other non-car road users). And we weren’t alone: our members stepped up as well, sharing fascinating insights from their work to help explain how their technologies can help improve the safety of pedestrians and cyclists. In hopes of highlighting just how much effort is going into addressing this problem, we’re bringing as much of this work together here into a one-stop blog post covering the latest in VRU-focused automation.

First, however, it is important to understand the problem our members are working so hard to solve. PAVE members are making great strides: the Governor’s Highway Safety Association has been a leader in studying pedestrian and cyclist safety, in partnership with the Pedestrian and Bicycle Information Center.

GHSA’s most recent report on this topic, which looks at 2019 preliminary data, projects that 6,590 pedestrians were killed on American roads last year, a five percent increase from 2018 which, in turn, was up 3.4% from 2017. Once verified, that would make 2019 the deadliest year for pedestrians in this country since 1990, showing that these numbers are trending in the wrong direction. Even as a percentage of all road traffic fatalities, pedestrian deaths have been on the rise for some time, climbing from 12% in 2009 to 17% in 2018… a share not seen since 1982.

We had GHSA’s Pam Fischer on one of our weekly virtual discussions, and she helped us dig into this data to understand what is causing these deaths. She pointed to a wide variety of factors, from infrastructure and street lighting to the growing size of vehicles, noting that 76% of pedestrian fatalities in 2018 took place in the dark, 59% took place on non-freeway arterials and 47% took place in just five states (Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia and Texas). Booming sales of trucks and SUVs, rising driver distraction and persistent problems with intoxicated driving seem to be factors as well.

With this overview of the problem in mind, we turn to the opportunities to address these issues in the short term using driver assistance systems, which was the subject of our first October panel (which you can watch above). We were thrilled to be joined by Ken McLeod, Policy Director at the League of American Bicyclists, who gave us a cyclist’s-eye-view of the problem. Representing PAVE’s members were Rini Sherony, Senior Principal Engineer at Toyota’s Collaborative Safety Research Center, and Mike Walters, VP of Product Management for the components business at FLIR Systems.

Sherony explained that Toyota looks closely at real-world data when it develops new safety systems, and the troubling trends on VRU safety numbers contributed (along with stricter Euro NCAP standards) to Toyota adding pedestrian and cyclist detection to its latest Safety Sense suite. Her hope is that as these systems achieve higher penetration rates we will see the VRU data start to improve, although she cautions that some happen in complex situations that will require more advanced technology to prevent.

One of those more advanced challenges is preventing the large percentage of pedestrian fatalities that take place at night, and FLIR’s Mike Walters described how thermal imaging could address this challenge directly. Whether by augmenting the driver’s situational awareness, like a “spotlight” system already offered in some European luxury vehicles, or by automatically stopping using a thermal-powered AEB system that shows real promise in development testing, Walters argued that thermal imaging was key to the next step in pedestrian-aware ADAS.

Our second virtual discussion went beyond driver assistance to look at the fascinating ways in which fully autonomous vehicles are being prepared to achieve higher levels of VRU safety in the future. With guests from influential companies in the AV world — Mobileye’s Gaby Hayon, Cruise’s Nadia Anderson, and Sam Anthony, who founded a company called Perceptive Automata focused on solving problems related to AV pedestrian safety — this conversation highlighted a wide variety of approaches and a deep commitment to next-level safety.

Dr. Hayon’s comments touched on a wide variety of factors that go into Mobileye’s pedestrian safety efforts, some of which are summarized in a subsequent company blog post. From object detection to stereoscopic analysis, from pixel labeling to what the company calls “VIDAR,” Mobileye draws on its industry-leading experience in computer vision for automated driving (Hayon holds pedestrian safety-related patents dating back to 2004!) and marries that expertise to its Responsibility-Sensitive Safety framework.

Cruise’s Dr. Anderson described the importance of pedestrian safety to the company, which is rooted in its plans to deploy fully driverless vehicles in the challenging downtown of San Francisco, and explained the dizzying array of challenging scenarios that this presents. Highlighting the fascinating work her colleagues are doing to leverage motion capture technology developed for videogames, Anderson noted that a wide variety of techniques and technologies are required to handle the sheer variety of VRU-related challenges you see somewhere like San Francisco.

And Dr. Anthony described the work Perceptive Automata is doing, bringing insights gleaned from behavioral neuroscience into the world of machine learning to surface lessons that will help AVs keep pedestrians safe. Though that means Perceptive’s technology can interpret a pedestrian’s intent based on something as seemingly innocuous as how they hold a bag, he argues that Perceptive is not a “prediction” company in the traditional sense but rather a human understanding company. That means understanding everything from how people act at different times of day to what we can learn from the 2018 Uber autonomous test vehicle crash in Tempe, Arizona, and you can tell that Sam lives and breathes the challenge of working toward a future where pedestrian deaths are a thing of the past.

November 9, 2020