This life sav­ing tech­nol­ogy, along with four other life and/or time sav­ing tech­nolo­gies, are being shown this week at the Intel­li­gent Trans­port Sys­tems World Con­gress in Detroit.

• Walk­ing Safely

The tech­nol­ogy is five or more years away. Cars need receivers and radio fre­quen­cies need to be set aside by the gov­ern­ment. Send­ing out a con­stant sig­nal will quickly drain a cell phone bat­tery. And engi­neers are work­ing on dis­tin­guish­ing between a phone in a pedestrian’s pocket from one held by a pas­sen­ger inside another car, Vang said. The hope is fewer pedes­trian deaths. In 2012, the last year for which data is avail­able, 4,473 pedes­tri­ans died in traf­fic crashes, the high­est num­ber in five years.

• Pre­vent­ing Pileups

Black ice that forms sud­denly is often blamed for multi-vehicle pile­ups world­wide, because dri­vers can’t stop in time. Now, state trans­porta­tion offi­cials in Nevada, Min­nesota and Michi­gan are test­ing tech­nol­ogy that can warn peo­ple when the first car hits ice. “We’re using it now,” said Steve Cook, field ser­vices engi­neer for the Michi­gan Depart­ment of Trans­porta­tion, who wouldn’t guess how long it will take to get all cars on the system.

Sen­sors on the vehi­cles mea­sure road sur­face tem­per­a­ture and other weather data. They also check the pave­ment for pot­holes. The cars relay the infor­ma­tion, as well as data on loca­tion and wind­shield wiper, antilock brake and trac­tion con­trol use, to a cen­tral com­puter that sends mes­sages telling other dri­vers to slow down.

• Auto­matic Braking

We’ve all seen tele­vi­sion com­mer­cials adver­tis­ing fancy radar sys­tems that auto­mat­i­cally brake a car to avoid a crash and save an inat­ten­tive dri­ver. The sys­tems are typ­i­cally expen­sive options, around $3,000, on high-end lux­ury cars. But auto parts maker Aisin aims to bring the tech­nol­ogy to main­stream cars.

The system’s cam­eras, two in the front and two in the back, can sense chil­dren, other cars and even deer, and auto­mat­i­cally brake the car, said Ichiji Yamada, deputy gen­eral man­ager of chas­sis sys­tems. Engi­neers wouldn’t reveal the price, but said Aisin is work­ing with Toy­ota to put the sys­tem on mass-market cars around 2020. The cost is lower because of advance­ments in cam­era technologies.

• Traf­fic Light Alert

Bicy­cle rid­ers are often ignored by sys­tems designed to change a traf­fic light when a car arrives. A Raleigh, North Car­olina, com­pany called Kimley-Horn has come up with a smart­phone app that gets cyclists noticed. It uses the phone’s GPS and sig­nals a cen­tral com­puter via the Inter­net to turn the light green. The sys­tem will be tested this fall with 100 cyclists in Austin, Texas. It could go city­wide by 2016, said Kimley-Horn’s Doug Gettman. Sim­i­lar trans­mit­ters could be installed on all vehi­cles, so the com­puter can detect them and man­age traf­fic lights, keep­ing them green for large blocks of vehi­cles, Gettman said.

• HOV Lane Monitor

Japan­ese tech­nol­ogy com­pany NEC wants to stop sin­gle rid­ers from cheat­ing in high-occupancy vehi­cle lanes reserved for cars with two or more peo­ple. NEC has a sys­tem of cam­eras and infrared sen­sors that records the num­ber of peo­ple in a car and the license num­ber. Isamu Suzuki, senior man­ager of busi­ness devel­op­ment, says enforce­ment is low because a lim­ited num­ber of humans mon­i­tor the lanes. The sys­tem can imme­di­ately notify police or store infor­ma­tion so traf­fic tick­ets can be sent later. Due to pri­vacy con­cerns, it doesn’t store facial images. State gov­ern­ments could begin using the sys­tem late this year or early next year, hope­fully speed­ing up travel for those who use the lanes properly.

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