Grant: Alliance Grants

Safety of cyclists and pedestrians and cyclists is a world-wide concern, with some 27% of the 1.24 million annual road deaths globally involving these vulnerable road users (VRUs). On Canadian roads, there are some 325 VRU deaths and 1,500 seriously injured VRUs per year resulting from largely preventable crashes. This collaborative project between Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and Lund University, Sweden will have two objectives with the aim of improving the knowledge base for reducing this toll of deaths and injuries. Although VRUs are key targets of Vision Zero programs around the globe, crashes involving them are relatively rare, so there are limits to the insights that can be gained in understanding and improving VRU safety with crash-based analyses. On the other hand, surrogate safety measures (SSMs), which are based on "near misses" when a crash is narrowly avoided, can provide those insights because of the high frequency of such encounters. Therefore, both objectives will be addressed with SSMs. For the first objective, advanced modeling techniques will be developed and applied to data collected using a questionnaire and a bicycle simulator at Lund University, Sweden. The expected outcome is a better understanding of the behavioral aspects affecting the performance of riders they relate to design characteristics of the road environment and the bicycles. For the second objective, advanced statistical methods will be applied to data collected from videos to better understand the factors related to the near miss encounters that are most likely to lead to pedestrian crashes.