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Worldwide, 1.2 million people die in road crashes yearly; 43,000 just in Europe. This implies a cost to the European society of approximately 160 billion euro, making use of 10% of all health care resources. Sharp objects like crash barriers may lead vulnerable road users into serious injuries. Different road restraint system designs have been developed in recent years to improve vulnerable road users' safety. SMART RRS is an FP7 SST 2007 RTD1 European collaborative project funded by the EC with the participation of 10 institutions from 5 countries.

Around 15% of traffic accident casualties in Europe are pedestrians. To date, most of the studies carried out only provide statistical information on the problem and little study in-depth the countermeasures which might correct it. There are many studies concerning pedestrian protection, which can be grouped into ‘pedestrian modelling’, ‘biomechanical limits for pedestrians’ and ‘statistical analysis for pedestrian accidents’. Despite these studies, there is no predictive analysis of the benefits of pedestrian protection systems based on their intrinsic capabilities applied to a real accident sample. This paper describes a methodology for the evaluation of pedestrian protection systems based on the analysis of a wide sample of urban pedestrian accidents. All of them are analysed in-depth and reconstructed with PC-Crash. The effects of the frontal structure of the vehicles and several active systems, such as BAS and Pedestrian Detection Systems, are evaluated.