Assessing the Safety Benefit of Advanced Vehicular Technology for Protecting Pedestrians Pedestrian Protection Airbags

Abstract

Pedestrian safety is of keen interest because the vulnerability of pedestrians leads to severe injuries in pedestrian vehicle crashes. Various countermeasures for protecting pedestrians have been developed in the field of traffic and vehicular safety engineering. The pedestrian protection airbag system (PPAS) is one of the recently developed vehicular technologies for pedestrian protection. PPAS is a promising, passive safety technology for reducing the severity of pedestrian injury. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the safety benefits of PPAS. A probabilistic pedestrian fatality model and a set of linear regression models were employed to estimate the effectiveness of PPAS in reducing the severity of pedestrian injury. Head injury criteria data, which represented the level of severity of pedestrian head injury, were obtained from indoor experimental collisions. The number of pedestrian fatalities was estimated for two cases on the basis of the pedestrian fatality model: one with PPAS and one without PPAS. In addition, market penetration rates (IVEPRs) were applied in analyzing the safety benefits in various scenarios. Approximately 30.30% to 68.94% of pedestrian fatalities would be saved with 100% MPR of PPAS. The outcomes of this study could be used to enhance the functionality of PPAS for reducing fatalities and establishing relevant traffic safety policies.