In the modern world, road traffic deaths represent one of the single largest categories of unnatural mortality long tolerated?and even accepted?as an inevitable cost of economic development. For decades, conventional Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) and emerging vehicle-to-everything (V2X) initiatives have fallen into a pervasive technical fallacy: defining roadway infrastructure merely as a passive, static physical carrier, while gambling all safety functions on inherently unstable wireless communication channels and pinning their hopes on automated driving completely supplanting human drivers. In Driver?Road Cooperation: Engineering the Active Road, the author adopts a global comparative perspective to rigorously demonstrate that roadway infrastructure ought to stand as a primary subject of traffic safety, and that engineering technology is fully capable of anchoring both function and liability. Within an open roadway ecosystem, infrastructure must no longer remain a mute physical support; it must become an active, legally accountable subject of active safety capable of real-time sensing and expression. Drawing on deep institutional and jurisprudential comparisons across the Commonwealth, the United States, Europe, China, and Japan, the author exposes the fatal flaw of the V2X paradigm: the overwhelming majority of fatal crashes worldwide involve roadway departures, impaired drivers, and vulnerable road users?such as pedestrians and cyclists?who carry no communication transceivers. A system predicated on road users carrying personal terminals structurally excludes from day one the very lives most in need of protection. To resolve this crisis, the treatise formulates an actionable and economically viable alternative tailored to open-road mixed-traffic realities where manual driving will persist for decades: Driver?Road Cooperation (DRC). Grounded in the foundational principle of "physical technology first, digital technology layered on top," it constructs an open four-layer architecture comprising Platform, Node, Facility, and Terminal. By transforming conventional traffic signs, markings, and signals into actively visible, functional, and verifiable digital assets, the roadway directly delivers instructions into the human line of sight, facilitates seamless road-information access for automated driving, and safely degrades during power and communication outages?preventing systemic blind spots. Crucially, the book bridges engineering and tort jurisprudence to show how retrievable facility operating logs will fundamentally reconstruct the judicial burden of proof, unburdening drivers from an infrastructural liability long misplaced upon their shoulders. Rigorous, incisive, and deeply humane, this work delivers an indispensable, forward-looking roadmap for transportation engineers, urban planners, policymakers, and legal practitioners worldwide seeking to reconcile life safety with systemic efficiency.
