Equity Benefits

Equity Benefits of Lidar

The Lidar Coalition is focused on promoting safety for drivers and vulnerable road users through lidar-based intelligent infrastructure and automotive safety technology. Light Detection and Ranging, or “lidar,” is a remote sensing method that uses pulsed light to create a 3D map of the surrounding environment. It is a key component in emerging transportation technologies in smart infrastructure, advanced driver-assistance systems (“ADAS”), and many other applications.

1. Lidar Protects Vulnerable Road Users in Degraded Visual Conditions

Lidar-based technologies improve overall road safety because lidar can perform at night or in adverse weather. Lidar can therefore help reduce death rates among vulnerable road users, most of which occur at night. The Governors Highway Safety Association’s March 2021 preliminary data on pedestrian fatalities in 2020 shows two trends:

  • Pedestrian fatalities increased in a year when vehicle miles traveled sharply decreased, with 75% of pedestrian fatalities occurring in low light conditions; and
  • Black, Indigenous and People of Color accounted for a larger proportion of pedestrian fatalities than expected based on their respective share of the population.1

Lidar needs no ambient light and is designed to function even in degraded visual conditions, meaning it can protect vulnerable road users in conditions where human drivers and other sensor systems fall short. By providing a reliable sensor for visualizing and interacting with the 3D world around us, lidar can save lives across communities.

2. Lidar Does Not Differentiate Between Skin Tones

The deployment of lidar based systems can help promote equity in pedestrian-detection systems. Lidar functions by creating a 3D map of the environment using invisible pulsed light, which can detect people without differentiating between skin tones.

3. Lidar Is Privacy Protective by Minimizing Biometric Data Protection

Lidar sensors create a 3D map of the environment using pulsed light, which can detect and classify objects with precision without collecting biometric identifying information such as size and shape of facial features or an individual’s gait. Lidar thus balances safety and privacy by sensing the world around it without intrusively collecting sensitive data.

1 GOVERNORS HIGHWAY SAFETY ASSOCIATION, PEDESTRIAN TRAFFIC FATALITIES BY STATE 2020 PRELIMINARY DATA (2021).

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