Effectiveness of Automatic Emergency Braking for Protection of Pedestrians and Bicyclists in the U.S.
Biography
Dr. Samantha H. Haus completed her Ph.D. in Biomedical Engineering in 2021. She has also received graduate certificates on “Human Factors in Transportation Safety” and “Preparing the Future Professoriate”. Her dissertation work focused on understanding vehicle-pedestrian and vehicle-bicyclist crashes and assessing the effectiveness of automatic emergency braking at preventing or mitigating these crashes. After completing her degree, Dr. Samantha H. Haus joined the MIT AgeLab as a postdoctoral researcher.
Abstract
In the United States, there were 36,560 traffic-related fatalities in 2018, of which 20% were pedestrians, bicyclists, and other vulnerable road users (VRUs) [1]. Vulnerable road users are non-vehicle occupants who, because they are not enclosed in a vehicle, are at higher risk of injury in traffic crashes. While overall traffic fatalities in the US have been decreasing, pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities have been trending upward. Vehicle-based active safety features could avoid or mitigate crashes with VRUs, but are highly dependent on the ability to detect a VRU with enough time or distance. This work presents methods to examine the characteristics of vehicle-pedestrian and vehicle-bicycle crashes and near-crashes using a variety of data sources, assess the potential effectiveness of Automatic Emergency Braking (AEB) in avoiding and mitigating VRU crashes through modeling and simulation, and estimate the future benefits of AEB for VRU safety in the United States. Additionally, active safety features are most effective when behavior of VRUs can be anticipated, however, the behavior of pedestrians and bicyclists is notoriously unpredictable. Therefore, an approach to examine and categorize pedestrian behavior in response to near-crashes and crashes events is presented. Overall, findings suggest that AEB has great potential to avoid and mitigate collisions with pedestrians and bicyclists, but it cannot avoid all crashes even when an idealized AEB system is assumed. Most pedestrians and bicyclists were found to be visible for at least one second prior to the crash, but obstructions, the unpredictability of VRUs, and adverse weather/lighting conditions still pose challenges in avoiding and mitigating crashes with VRUs.
Haus, S. H. (2021). "Effectiveness of Automatic Emergency Braking for Protection of Pedestrians and Bicyclists in the U.S." Dissertation. Virginia Tech.
Committee:
H. Clay Gabler, Chair
Miguel Perez, Co-Chair
Zachary Doerzaph
F. Scott Gayik
Jessica Jermakian
