Evaluating the safety of autonomous vehicle–pedestrian interactions: An extreme value theory approach

With the increasing advancements in autonomous vehicle (AV) technologies, the forecasts of AV market shares seem to follow an ever-growing trend. This leads to the inherent need for proactive safety evaluations of AV impacts on other road users. To that end, this study proposes a modeling framework for the proactive assessment of pedestrian safety in AV environments. The proposed framework relies on the Extreme Value Theory (EVT), with the peak over threshold modeling technique, to develop an estimate of AV-pedestrian collisions using AV-pedestrian conflicts. The proposed framework was applied to two AV datasets, collected from three locations in the US and Singapore, using the operating AV fleets of two developers, Motional and Lyft. Both datasets included trajectory data for the subject AV, as well as LiDAR point clouds and annotated video data from AV cameras to capture the trajectories of surrounding road users. The datasets were processed to extract the AV-pedestrian conflicts along with the corresponding conflict indicators, mainly the post-encroachment time (PET) and time-to-collision (TTC). Relevant covariates were introduced to the proposed models to enhance their performance and prediction accuracy, including turning movements and conflict speeds. The results indicate an alarming risk to pedestrians when interacting with AVs, especially at the early stages of AV adoption. The expected number of collisions ranged from 4 to 5.5 per million vehicle kilometers travelled (VKT) of the AVs. With the addition of the covariates, the expected number of collisions went down to a range of 2.3–3.7 per million VKT, but with a narrower confidence interval of the resulting estimate and a better fit. The introduced approach shows promising prospects for the application of EVT methods to address AV safety impacts. It also invites future applications to address issues of concern for pedestrian safety in different conditions of urban traffic.