Improve pedestrian safety using the tried-and-true usual method: adding lasers.

The Issue:

Thousands of pedestrian fatalities occur every year. It can be easy for the driver of a fast-moving car to not see a person crossing the road ahead until it’s too late.

Often, these collisions occur at night, even in areas with good streetlight coverage. But if streetlights aren’t sufficient, what else can be done?

Proposal:

Figure 1 shows a normal “traditional” crosswalk with two pedestrians. Note the presence of a reasonable quantity of streetlights. Generally, this is considered to be “as good as it gets” as far as crossing safety.

Fig. 1: Here are some people crossing a street at night. Although the street lights illuminate the area somewhat, it’s still not incredibly easy to see pedestrians (especially if they’re wearing dark colors).

When we think of what this looks like from the perspective of an approaching car, it’s even worse: the pedestrians might not be effectively illuminated at all, and will basically just be indistinguishable silhouettes on a dark background.

Fig. 2: A “side view” of the same scene from Figure 1, from the viewpoint of an approaching car.

The solution: use modern technology to identify moving objects in the roadway and highlight them with an incredibly bright laser (Figure 3).

All we need to do is adapt a few streetlights so that they have a basic camera and computer vision algorithm, and then set up some lasers that the lights can shine on pedestrians as they cross.

Fig. 3: Thanks to this ultra-bright laser illumination (which is directed at any detected moving objects), drivers will easily notice these pedestrians.

Conclusion:

You may accuse me of being in the pocket of “Big Laser,” but all I care about is public safety.

PROS: It’s always good to add more lasers to things.

CONS: Could there be… too many lasers, though??

Originally published 2025-08-04.