Abstract
Urban cycling is increasingly common in many North American cities and has the potential to address key challenges of urban mobility, congestion, air pollution and health. However, lack of safety is often cited by potential bike users as the most important deterrent to cycling. This study aimed to evaluate the effect of cycling facility type on traffic conflict likelihood. Four participants recorded a total of 87 h (1199 km) of video, which was reviewed by trained observers to identify and characterize traffic conflicts, yielding 465 conflicts with vehicles and 209 conflicts with pedestrians. Bootstrapped generalized additive logit regressions (GAM) were built to predict traffic conflict likelihood. Results show that while cycling on an off-street bike path effectively reduces the likelihood of conflict with a vehicle, it increases the probability of conflict with a pedestrian. Bike lanes were associated with an increase in the likelihood of a conflict with a vehicle. Decision makers should favor physically segregated and clearly marked cyclist-only facilities to ensure safe and efficient conditions for commuter cyclists.
Highlights
Safety 2021, 7, 63. https://doi.org/While improving their individual health and reducing traffic and pollution, urban cyclists are vulnerable to many risks, such as air pollution and noise exposure, as well as injuries from collisions with other road users [1,2,3,4,5,6]
0.20; deviance explained = 0.16, CI (95%) = 0.13–0.20.). This reflects the fact that conflict likelihood depends upon a broad spectrum of factors that are not modeled here. These statistics do not undermine the ability of the models to reveal significant associations between cycleway type and conflict likelihood, which is the main objective of this paper
Even if our results show that vehicle conflict likelihood is lower when the bike lane is located on an arterial road than on a collector or local street, conflict and collision severity may be higher on arterial roads due to the higher traffic volumes and speeds, as well as the presence of heavy vehicles
Summary
While improving their individual health and reducing traffic and pollution, urban cyclists are vulnerable to many risks, such as air pollution and noise exposure, as well as injuries from collisions with other road users [1,2,3,4,5,6]. Usual methods to evaluate safety include police-declared collisions and hospital admissions databases [9]. These studies often suffer from underreporting bias since most minor injuries and crashes are not reported to authorities [10]. It is possible to study interactions between road users and characterize them as normal or conflictual [11]. Though traffic conflict analysis was mostly developed for car driving studies since the 1970s, its use to study cyclist interactions is increasing [15]
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