Pedestrian fatalities have been increasing in the United States over the past decade; in 2021 they reached a 40-year high and together with an increasing number of bicyclist fatalities surged to over 8,400 vulnerable road users (VRUs) killed by motor vehicle crashes. There is widespread recognition of the link between passenger fleets transitioning from sedans to SUVs and pick-up trucks and the increase in vulnerable road user fatalities. Larger light-duty vehicles generally have larger blind zones, and larger blind zones are prominently linked to crashes with vulnerable road users. Heavy-duty commercial trucks, which comprise only four percent of vehicles on the road, are disproportionally associated with over eight percent of vulnerable road user deaths. With direct vision unregulated in the United States, there is a limited domestic market for large trucks with high direct vision despite research showing that one-quarter of the approximately 620 annual truck-involved pedestrian and bicyclist fatalities result from low-speed maneuvers with impaired direct vision and could be prevented by higher vision truck cabs. Communicating the seriousness of this problem is critical. This methods article presents an easy-to-use tool designed to give the public and fleet managers information to assess vehicle safety by quantifying driver blind zones using whatever driver eye positions are thought to be most applicable and with the option to standardize said eye position. Previously, measures of the percentage of volume surrounding the vehicle that cannot be seen or the number of people outside the vehicle that can fit in the blind zone could only be made with specialized instrumentation. The web-based application described, VIEW or visibility in elevated wide vehicles, can be used by anyone with a camera and access to the internet to obtain within approximately 15 min a reasonably accurate measure of the blind zone size, considerably faster than manual measurement methods. This article details the app usage procedure as well as the validation work conducted. In summary, the safety culture around SUVs, pickup trucks, and heavy-duty commercial trucks may change if drivers had an easy-to-use method to determine how much situational awareness they would be missing before they purchased a particular vehicle.
Low-vision trucks are ubiquitous. Vision-related problems, especially blind zones, are the second leading cause of truck–pedestrian strikes in the UK and are implicated in 25% of fatal truck–vulnerable road user crashes in the U.S.A. High-vision truck cabs could potentially reduce the number of truck–pedestrian strikes. In this research, undertaken on a driving simulator, we evaluated scenarios in which drivers of low-vision cabs could see pedestrians entering and exiting from the crosswalk out, respectively, of the driver and passenger side windows, but not when the pedestrian was in the front blind zone of the low-vision vehicle. In theory, drivers of the low-vision cabs could determine that a pedestrian who had crossed from one side did not exit on the other side. Conversely, drivers of high-vision cabs could see, but only barely, the heads of pedestrians traversing in front as well as entering and exiting the crosswalk. In none of the 45 scenarios did the drivers of the high-vision cabs strike the pedestrian in front of their vehicle. However, in 39 of the 45 scenarios the drivers of the low-vision cabs struck the pedestrian. This indicates that direct vision to the sides is not enough by itself to allow drivers of low-vision cabs to predict the presence of pedestrians directly in front of them, whereas direct vision both to the front and the sides allows drivers of high-vision cabs to refrain from striking pedestrians directly in front, a situation that is common in the signalized intersection crosswalk scenarios tested in this study.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.