In order to comprehensively understand the research progress of roadside safety and formulate prevention and control programs, the development directions of roadside safety were shown from three aspects: the proportion of publication, the source of publication and the country of publication. Then, the research status, existing issues and future development trends of roadside safety were analyzed from two aspects: the risk assessment of roadside accidents and the roadside safety design. Finally, the different evaluation models and prediction methods for the risk assessment of roadside accidents were summarized. The results show that the first ten significant cause factors that lead to high-risk roadside accidents are, in decreasing order of importance, driver age ≤ 25 or ≥ 65, alcohol, small radius curve, speeding, failure to use seat belts, heavy trucks, heavy traffic, objects adjacent to the lane, no lighting/night, and the narrow shoulder. In terms of roadside accident risk assessment, future research should integrate mobile and static multi-source data, put forward a method for assessing the risk situation of roadside accidents, and further explore the interaction mechanism of accident causation factors. In the aspect of roadside safety design, a set of reasonable and effective protection methods should be suggested from the aspects of accurately quantifying the width of the clear zone, formulating the setting conditions of clear zone, reasonably matching the grade of guardrail and reducing the design cost of energy dissipation of traffic facilities. In addition, under the current research focus on intelligent network connection, it is also the future research direction to improve the vehicle running stability by constructing a human-vehicle-road collaborative comprehensive perception system and a road network comprehensive operation monitoring and warning system.
