Enhancing Vulnerable Road User Safety: A Survey of Existing Practices and Consideration for Using Mobile Devices for V2X Connections

Vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists are at the highest risk in the road traffic environment. Globally, over half of road traffic deaths are vulnerable road users. Although substantial efforts are being made to improve VRU safety from engineering solutions to law enforcement, the death toll of VRUs' continues to rise. The emerging technology, Cooperative Intelligent Transportation System (C-ITS), has the proven potential to enhance road safety by enabling wireless communication to exchange information among road users. Such exchanged information is utilized for creating situational awareness and detecting any potential collisions in advance to take necessary measures to avoid any possible road casualties. The current state-of-the-art solutions of C-ITS for VRU safety, however, are limited to unidirectional communication where VRUs are only responsible for alerting their presence to drivers with the intention of avoiding collisions. This one-way interaction is substantially limiting the enormous potential of C-ITS which otherwise can be employed to devise a more effective solution for the VRU safety where VRU can be equipped with bidirectional communication with full C-ITS functionalities. To address such problems and to explore better C-ITS solution suggestions for VRU, this paper reviewed and evaluated the current technologies and safety methods proposed for VRU safety over the period 2007-2020. Later, it presents the design considerations for a cellular-based Vehicle-to-VRU (V2VRU) communication system along with potential challenges of a cellular-based approach to provide necessary recommendations.