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

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 20m from the front of the car.