Citation

Guirao B, Gálvez-Pérez D, Casado-Sanz N. Transp. Res. Proc. 2023; 71: 403-410.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2023, Elsevier Publications)

DOI

10.1016/j.trpro.2023.11.101

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Cycling is a healthy transportation mode to promote sustainability in our cities, but one of the major threads of cycling are traffic safety concerns. The existence of a protected cycling infrastructure can help to avoid traffic accidents, but in the majority of big cities the cycling infrastructure is heterogeneous, and the shared lanes (known as "sharrows") are the most common type. Until know, few research has been devoted to analyze how the type of cyclist infrastructure, the street features and traffic levels affects bike accidents. The main objective of this paper is to analyze infrastructure and traffic factors affecting cyclist injuries, being the city of Madrid selected as case study. In a first stage, an identification of different types of cyclist infrastructure in Madrid was developed and streets were grouped in relation to their level of bike protection, that ranged from level 1 (separated cyclist lane) to level 4 (outside any cyclist infrastructure). The accident data base was provided by DGT (2016-2019) and, in a second stage, 2269 accidents (involving at least one bike) were filtered and geo-located in Madrid. Geolocation of accidents allowed to link each accident to a set of infrastructure (type of street) and traffic variables. Each bike accident was linked to a cyclist infrastructure type for his closeness to the cyclist network and a set of safety indicators were designed to compare bike road safety between Madrid districts. Finally, a binary logit regression was designed to model the severity of the bike accidents, including variables of street and cyclist infrastructure, the population density and indicators linked to the level of traffic. The results of the paper can help policy makers to improve the design of the cyclist structure in order to decrease the number of bike accidents

Language: en

Keywords

cyclist infratructure; cyclist mobility; road safety; urban roads