The number of traffic deaths in Japan was 4,863 in 2010. When looking at the number of the road accident fatalities (4,863) in 2010, it reveals that pedestrians account for the highest number (1,714, 35%). To reduce the severity of injuries and the number of deaths, active safety devices providing pedestrian detection are considered to be ones of the effective countermeasures. The detailed features of the contact scenarios in car-to-pedestrian are necessary to develop the safety devices. Since the information on the real-world accidents was limited, the authors focused on the near-miss scenarios captured by drive recorders installed in passenger cars.

The first purpose of the present study is to ascertain the utility of using near-miss scenarios for understanding the features of the contact situations between cars and pedestrians. In the present study, the authors investigated the similarities between the data of near-miss incidents including motion pictures captured by drive recorders and the data of national traffic accidents based on real-world fatal pedestrian accidents in Japan. This study used 163 motion pictures of near-miss car-to-pedestrian incident data collected by the Society of Automotive Engineers of Japan (J-SAE) from 2005 to 2009. The results indicated that 70% pedestrians at intersections or on straight roads were crossing the roads in front of the forward moving cars both in accidents and near-miss incidents. Considering the features of pedestrians’ behaviors from this result, the authors found similarities between accidents and near-miss incidents. It was made clear that one could estimate the situations in pedestrians’ accident from the near-miss incident data which included motion pictures capturing pedestrian behaviors.

The second purpose of the present study is to estimate the time to collision (TTC) from the near-miss incident data. This study analyzed 103 near-miss car-to-pedestrian incident data in which pedestrians were crossing the roads in front of the forward moving cars at intersections or on straight roads. We calculated the TTC from the velocity of a car with an installed drive recorder and the distance between a car and a pedestrian at the moment a pedestrian initially appeared on a motion picture captured by the drive recorder. As a result, the average TTC was 1.7 seconds (SD 1.3 seconds). The average TTC was 1.8 seconds in cases that pedestrians were walking across a crosswalk, which was longer than the average TTC 1.4 seconds in the cases that pedestrians were walking across the roads without a crosswalk. The authors propose that the specifications of the safety device for the pedestrian detection and for automatic braking should reflect the detailed information including the TTC obtained by the near miss situations, in which the worst situation was assumed that the cars were moving toward pedestrians without