Bayati and Khattak Examine Rare but Lethal Pedestrian Crashes
On average, car crashes cause more than 40,000 deaths per year in the United States. Technologies like seat belts, advanced airbags, and automated braking systems have improved car driver and passenger safety, but pedestrian deaths due to crashes have actually increased by 48% over the last decade, reaching about 7,500 fatalities in 2022.
Transportation researchers comb through police crash reports to identify infrastructure countermeasures that will help in the greatest number of cases. However, sometimes improving the average situation isn’t enough.
“By using traditional analysis methods that focus on the average, most studies on pedestrian safety overlook crashes that are rarer but may cause disproportionately high-risk injuries,” said Zeinab Bayati, a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE) and CTR graduate research assistant.
The most common pedestrian crashes occur during the day and at intersections, but such crashes also usually result in comparatively minor injuries. High-risk injury scenarios—those in which pedestrians are much more likely to be seriously injured or killed—are less common but still vital to consider, said Bayati’s doctoral advisor, CEE Beaman Professor and CTR faculty member Asad Khattak.
Using AI methods, Bayati and Khattak developed a novel framework that analyzes pedestrian crash data and sorts events into meaningful groups. Their research, published in the journal Accident Analysis and Prevention this January, revealed that safety measures aimed at the most common crashes might not save the most lives.
“We identified that the rare cases are indeed the more fatal cases,” Bayati said. “That is very important. We want to see what’s going on behind this pattern.”
Read the full article at tickle.utk.edu