Worldwide, pedestrians make up close to half of all motor-vehicle related fatalities but disproportionally little of the research in Information Technologies (IT) in general and Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) in particular has aimed at pedestrian safety improvements. This paper analyses and compiles three different ways so that IT and ITS can be used in order to improve mobility and safety of pedestrians in urban spaces: (a) for contacting and/or being localized, (b) for guidance (leading/navigating), (c) for alerting or informing of a danger.

The aim is to categorize recent experiences where ITS can improve pedestrians’ mobility and safety so that new ideas based on ITS will be developed. These new ideas will better meet pedestrians’ functional quality needs today as well as in the future in a society with an aging population and aging infrastructure. This is very important for a society where people will not accept high fatality risks. The most important developments are described with links to websites in which one can gather more information.

Target groups of this paper are professionals working in the field of traffic planning; practitioners, planners and researchers.