Potential Fatal Crash Reduction in South Carolina due to Different Levels of Automated Driving

Since 1995, several countries and states have implemented roadway traffic safety projects with the goal of achieving a highway system with no fatal or serious injury crashes.  South Carolina’s Target Zero plan is multifaceted in that it identifies several preventative measures to reduce fatalities. A common thread of these programs is that they are aspirational and there is not an expectation that zero fatalities will ever be a reality. While there are many contributors to fatal crashes, by far the biggest contributor is driver error. In South Carolina, the first contributing factor in nearly 85% of fatal crashes is driver related. Thus, to approach a target of zero fatalities will require eliminating drivers from the equation—or at least making drivers error free. This presentation focuses on how 2019 South Carolina fatal crash data could be impacted hypothetically by different scenarios of autonomous vehicle (AV) safety applications. A detailed review of contributing factors to 919 2019 fatal crashes in South Carolina along with a review of site characteristics for each crash was conducted. A deterministic approach was used to calculate the effects of different AV levels on each of the fatal crashes. The approach was based primarily on literature findings with regard to the safety effectiveness of vehicle characteristics for each level. The estimated reduction in fatal crashes ranged from 10% to 23% for level 1 to nearly 95% for level 5 AV. The underlying assumption in terms of AV level is that the entire population of vehicles fall within that AV category.