Bicycle safety

We were glad to see discussion of the dangers of distracted driving to vulnerable road users in the article by Stimpson et al. in the November/December 2013 issue of Public Health Reports. However, we question the conclusion that pedestrian and bicyclist victims of distracted driving crashes are disproportionately nonHispanic white. This inference appears to be drawn from the results in Table 1 of the article, where the rates are calculated per one million total population, which fails to account for the different sizes of the populations of each race/ethnicity. To correctly evaluate the...

This paper presents a method to assess the safety of uncontrolled intersections considering both conflict probability and severity, which are two major properties of traffic conflicts. This method provides not only the safety level of the entire intersection but also the distribution of safety within intersections. Intersections are modelled by a two-dimensional Cartesian coordinate system and the internal space of intersections is divided into cells. Firstly, vehicle movement characteristics of at uncontrolled intersections are modelled. Secondly, conflict probability of each cell within...

Bicycling is becoming more popular across the country, for commuting, exercise, and leisure. However, in the event of a traffic collision between a motor vehicle and a bicyclist, the bicyclist is the more vulnerable party and is more likely to be injured or killed than motor vehicle passengers. Bicycling fatalities increased 14.4 percent from 734 in 2012 to 840 in 2016 nationwide. Bicyclist fatalities represented 2.2 percent of the total number of traffic fatalities in 2016. Bicycle collisions are defined as crashes where one or more victims is a bicyclist, other cyclist, or bicycling...