Sensor-Friendly Vehicle and Roadway Cooperative Safety Systems: Benefits Estimation

An analysis was performed to estimate the potential national costs and benefits of cooperative vehicle and roadway measures to enhance the effectiveness of driver assistance systems. These cooperative measures—query-response communication systems, light-emitting-diode brake light messaging, radar cross-section paint-striping modifications, fluorescent paint for lane and other marking applications, passive amplifiers on license plates, spatial tetrahedral arrays of reflectors, and in-vehicle corner cubes—are briefly described, along with assumptions that were made regarding performance. For the example lane departure case, the incremental nationwide effectiveness over an autonomous collision-avoidance system is estimated and monetized. This was generally determined with respect to annual crash-reduction savings, although the technique used allows other mobility benefits to be considered. The marginal benefits of providing each sensor-friendly technology were then calculated and aggregated across the various Intelligent Vehicle Initiative services so that a total marginal benefit was determined for each technology. Complementing this, a method has been established to estimate the magnitude of at- and near-intersection lead-vehicle-not-moving crashes for these technologies. Together, these methods illustrate national benefits across all crash types (the three-step process) and a more focused means to estimate benefits for a particular crash type (rear-end collisions at or near intersections)—and provide a composite approach to the problem.