The safety potential of lane keeping assistance and possible actions to improve the potential

Before widespread automated driving, driver assistance systems become more common and can deliver safety benefits. This study focuses on current and future lane keeping assistance (LKA) systems and their potential safety effects by analysing real-world crash data and LKA’s possibilities to prevent fatal passenger car crashes. The analysed data includes in-depth analysis of 364 fatal head-on and single-vehicle crashes in Finland. According to statistical analysis, 27% of these crashes could potentially have been prevented had currently available LKA been deployed. In this study, many issues are examined related to the lane markings’ visibility, infrastructure, weather, and driver-related risks, which rationalise the results, compliment previous research, and highlight possibilities to increase the safety potential of LKA. Related to the lane markings’ visibility, safety potential could be improved by allocating more resources to road maintenance and to snow clearance. Advanced LKA enabling exploiting digital lane markings could hypothetically almost double the safety potential as weather conditions or the visibility of lane markings would not restrict LKA’s operation. While the driver is still in charge of driving tasks, driver-related risks are difficult to manage and the crashes caused intendedly or due to driver’s attack of illness are not preventable by current LKA systems.