Bicycle safety

There’s a statistic that sticks in the minds of many who work on traffic safety issues: The U.S., among wealthy nations, has the highest rate of road traffic fatalities. People in the U.S. are nearly three times more likely to die in a car crash than people in Australia, and six times more likely than in Sweden.

For Julia Griswold, this troubling fact should be front of mind for everyone, whether they are drivers, cyclists, pedestrians or transportation planners. Griswold runs UC Berkeley’s...

A new report by UC Berkeley Safe Transportation Research and Education Center (SafeTREC) co-authored by Julia Griswold, Edna Aguilar and Md. Mintu Miah, "Creating an inclusive bicycle level of service: Virtual bicycle simulator study" aims to assess how virtual reality (VR) technology can be used to gather user feedback on a variety of bicycling...

According to the latest data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), there were 37,133 traffic fatalities on U.S. roadways in 2017, a 1.8-percent decrease from the 37,806 people killed in 2016. While there has been a general downward trend downward in traffic fatalities overall, this is still an alarmingly high number of deaths – and there have been troubling increases for vulnerable road users like pedestrians. A new report from the Governors Highway Safety...