Road Safety from Cyclist’s Perspective

Road safety is an essential design requirement in planning processes of cycling infrastructure. An evaluation criterion for safety are accident statistics, but this criterion lacks reliability with regard to cycling accidents because many accidents are not documented. In addition, an exclusive view of accident statistics only is inadequate because road safety also includes aspects such as objective as well as subjective safety of cyclists. In order to consider the cyclist’s perspective in the planning of cycling facilities, an exploratory study, based on the concept of the Urban Emotions Inititative, was carried out in Augsburg and presented in this contribution. The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of cycling infrastructure on the cyclist's stress and the perception of safety. As a result, 1040 stress situations of 26 cyclists were measured over a distance of 5.0 km using biostatistical measurement technology. 347 stress situations refer directly to road infrastructure and perceived safety. In addition, data from traffic and urban planning as well as other self-collected data regarding objective traffic safety were used to assess the cycling infrastructure. The analysis of the study shows that the objective analysis of road infrastructure and the subjective sense of safety of the cyclists are in many cases corresponding. An interesting result was that stress situations can differ in the same types of cycling facilities. A conclusion for stress and perception of safety is that constructive detail is more detached from stress triggers than the type of cycling facilities in general. An important issue is surface design. Bumps, damaged pavement and tram rails are often stressful, especially in combination with other road users. There are no clear differences in the frequency of conflicts between car drivers, pedestrians and cyclists. The number of stressful situations, in which a pedestrian was involved, was slightly predominant. Stress situations were caused through inappropriate use of cycle lanes, problems with orientation, confusing paths and a lack of acceptance of some types of cycle facilities. Base for thiscontribution is the bachelor thesis Road Safety from Cyclists ́ Perspective (Schmidkunz, 2018)