Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) has existed as a generic concept for more than 20 years. After many years of focusing on vehicles only, a trend of addressing traffic issues associated with the safety of vulnerable road users (VRUs), i.e. pedestrians, bicyclists and motorcyclists, emerged. A specific part of this reorientation has been the development of ITS addressing safety issues of VRUs. However, the group of vulnerable road users is heterogenous: One group uses powered two-wheelers, the two others are un-powered road users. All these road-user groups are unprotected and vulnerable in a crash with a car, but some significant issues may be overlooked when treating these sub-groups as one, “homogenous” road-user group. Hence, individual studies, and an analysis of each of the groups separately, is justified (Vaa, 2015). One such study, the case of motorcyclists, has been elaborated and was presented at the RS5C-conference in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 (Vaa, 2016).

The present paper will focus only on pedestrians, a vulnerable road user group which is completely unprotected, no passive safety system is developed to reduce the level of injuries if hit by a vehicle. The relative difference of speed, and the mass-difference between a pedestrian and a car, both cause the kinetic energy of a moving car with the higher mass to be transferred to the deformation of the human body. A driving speed of 30 km/h is regarded as the limit of what a human body can tolerate when hit by a car without being killed or inflicted by irreversible personal injuries (Anderson et al, 1997).

The first study to consider the potential effects on accidents of what later would be labeled Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS), was the Marburger et al study of 1989. What we have observed since Marburger et als’ study in 1989, is a confusing landscape of what exactly has been achieved in the last 25-30 years, especially regarding the impact of ITS on behaviour and accidents. We still miss attempts to provide systematic overviews, which try to systematize these effects. One study, which addressed ITS in vehicles and infrastructure, was done in 2007 (Vaa et al, 2007). Two other comprehensive studies were done by Bayly et al (2007) and Linder et al (2007), the former describing a total of 138 ITS-systems.