Cross-comparison of three surrogate safety methods to diagnose cyclist safety problems at intersections in Norway

Cross-comparison of three surrogate safety methods to diagnose cyclist safety problems at intersections in Norway

Laureshyn, A.
de Goede, M.
Saunier, N.
Fyhri, A.

2015

Relying on accident records as the main data source for studying cyclists’ safety has many drawbacks, such as high degree of under-reporting, the lack of accident details and particularly of information about the interaction processes that led to the accident. It is also an ethical problem as in order to make a statement about cyclists’ (un-)safety one has to wait for accidents to happen. In this perspective, the use of surrogate safety measures based on actual observations in traffic is very promising. The problem is that while a wide range of techniques and indicators has been suggested, their validation is often based on limited datasets while cross-comparison between the techniques has hardly been done. Another problem is that many of the techniques were developed having motor-vehicle traffic in mind and are not always very suitable for studying vulnerable road users. In this study we used video data from three intersections in Norway that were all independently analysed using three methods: the Swedish traffic conflict technique, the Dutch conflict technique DOCTOR and the probabilistic surrogate measures of safety developed in Canada. The first two techniques are based on detection and counting of critical events in traffic (traffic conflicts), while the third calculates the surrogate measures of safety taking into account multiple trajectories that may lead to a collision and compares the resulting distributions per site. Two questions are stated: i) do the three techniques agree in the safety diagnosis for each site? and ii) how well each technique is fit for handling the specific cyclist safety problems? The results are compared with the available accident data

Human & Operational Modelling
PCS - Perceptual and Cognitive Systems
ELSS - Earth, Life and Social Sciences
Safe and Clean Mobility
Traffic
Mobility
Cyclist safety
Surrogate safety measures
Traffic conflicts
Video analysis
Vulnerable road user safety

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:4a13c32d-ede0-4eb7-82ce-9f66c9ba0861

574894

International Cycling Safety Conference 2015 15-16 September 2015, Hanover, Germany, 1-16

conference paper