Intersections are among the most dangerous points in the transportation network, yet the means to make them dramatically safer already exist. Today’s roadside cameras, lidar, V2X roadside units, connected traffic signals, onboard vehicle sensors, and network-based safety messages each generate critical information in real time, but these capabilities operate in isolation. 

Without integration, life-saving insights remain stranded, allowing preventable collisions to occur. This white paper examines the human and technical barriers keeping cars and intersections from working together as a unified safety system. Drawing on real-world latency measurements, interoperability trials, and human–machine interaction studies, we reveal how fragmented deployments and conservative alerting strategies blunt the impact of otherwise powerful tools. 

We argue that a coordinated, digitally unified intersection ecosystem — one that combines infrastructure-based sensing, low-latency connectivity, and driver-centered alert delivery — can eliminate the false trade-off between safety and efficiency, preventing the majority of severe intersection crashes within the next decade.