Road fatalities pose significant public safety and health challenges worldwide, with pedestrians being particularly vulnerable in vehicle-pedestrian crashes due to disparities in physical and performance characteristics. This study employs explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) to identify key factors contributing to pedestrian fatalities across the five U.S. states with the highest crash rates (2018-2022). It compares them to the five states with the lowest fatality rates. Using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), the study applies machine learning techniques-including Decision Trees, Gradient Boosting Trees, Random Forests, and XGBoost-to predict contributing factors to pedestrian fatalities. To address data imbalance, the Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) is utilized, while SHapley Additive Explanations (SHAP) values enhance model interpretability. The results indicate that age, alcohol and drug use, location, and environmental conditions are significant predictors of pedestrian fatalities. The XGBoost model outperformed others, achieving a balanced accuracy of 98 %, accuracy of 90 %, precision of 92 %, recall of 90 %, and an F1 score of 91 %. Findings reveal that pedestrian fatalities are more common in mid-block locations and areas with poor visibility, with older adults and substance-impaired individuals at higher risk. These insights can inform policymakers and urban planners in implementing targeted safety measures, such as improved lighting, enhanced pedestrian infrastructure, and stricter traffic law enforcement, to reduce fatalities and improve public safety.

Since 2012, in a case-study in Bucaramanga-Colombia, 179 pedestrians died in car accidents, and another 2873 pedestrians were injured. Each day, at least one passerby is involved in a tragedy. Knowing the causes to decrease accidents is crucial, and using system-dynamics to reproduce the collisions' events is critical to prevent further accidents. This work implements simulations to save lives by reducing the city's accidental rate and suggesting new safety policies to implement. Simulation's inputs are video recordings in some areas of the city. Deep Learning analysis of the images results in the segmentation of the different objects in the scene, and an interaction model identifies the primary reasons which prevail in the pedestrians or vehicles' behaviours. The first and most efficient safety policy to implement - validated by our simulations - would be to build speed bumps in specific places before the crossings reducing the accident rate by 80%.

The vehicle did have a human operator in the car, but it was in autonomous mode. The driver, Rafaela Vasquez, said that "it was like a flash," when the person abruptly stepped out from a center median in front of the car. "His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision," Moir stated to the San Francisco Chronicle. The vehicle was traveling 38 mph in a 35 zone. The pedestrian did not appear to be using a crosswalk, though apparently the street design did make it appear as if that section was inviting people to cross.

On roads showing significant violations of posted speed limits, one measure of the safety effect of speeding is the difference between the road's actual accident count and the count that would have occurred if the posted speed limit had been strictly obeyed. An estimate of this accident reduction can be had by computing the probability that speeding was a necessary condition for each of set of accidents. This is an instance of assessing individual probabilities of causation, which is generally not possible absent prior knowledge of causal structure. For traffic accidents such prior knowledge is often available and this paper illustrates how, for a commonly occurring class of vehicle/pedestrian accidents, approaches to uncertainty and causal analyses appearing in the accident reconstruction literature can be unified using Bayesian networks. Measured skidmarks, pedestrian throw distances, and pedestrian injury severity are treated as evidence, and using the Gibbs Sampling routine BUGS, the posterior probability distribution over exogenous variables, such as the vehicle's initial speed, location, and driver reaction time, is computed. This posterior distribution is then used to compute the "probability of necessity" for speeding.