Traffic accident fatalities in Japan reached a record 16,765 people in 1970. The Traffic Safety Policies Law took effect in the same year, following which the adoption of various private and public measures reduced fatalities by roughly half to 8,466 in 1979. Subsequently, however, fatalities again began to rise, peaking in 1992 with 11,451 before again decreasing to 7,702 in 2003, falling below 8,000 for the first time in 46 years. In 2004, fatalities fell again by more than 300 to 7,358. (Figure 1) Nevertheless, the situation remains serious as the number of both traffic accidents and injuries reached record highs in 2004, and many precious lives continue to be lost. At the beginning of 2003 the government set the goal of "reducing traffic accident fatalities to under 5,000 in a decade and striving to achieve the safest road transportation in the world." The goal of 5,000 people in ten years is an aggressive one, and achieving it will require the implementation of powerful, comprehensive measures to address the interrelated factors of people, vehicles and roads that contribute to traffic accidents. One type of traffic safety measures in Japan has involved the application of electronics and other new technologies in attempts to achieve dramatic improvements in safety and convenience. Efforts to develop and popularize Advanced Safety Vehicle (ASV) technologies that strive to create more intelligent vehicles have been underway since fiscal 1991. Today, with the cooperation of industry, academia and government, the ASV Promotion Project is now in its third phase. This paper provides an overview of the third phase of the ASV Promotion Project, which began in fiscal 2001 and runs through fiscal 2005, and of the recent international symposium and public demonstration of inter-vehicle communication based driving support systems. (Author/publisher).
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