Piloting the Naturalistic Methodology on Bicycles

Paper in proceeding, 2012

Cycling is not a safe activity in Europe and claims over 2000 lives each year. In Gothenburg, Sweden, cycling safety has not significantly improved in the last five years, possibly due to the increasing number of cyclists. This paper describes the effort to adapt the naturalistic driving methodology to bicycles at SAFER (Vehicle and Traffic Safety Centre at Chalmers) in Gothenburg, and how this data can enable novel analyses and the development of accident countermeasures to increase bicycle safety. The equipped bicycles that are collecting naturalistic data in Gothenburg as well as the tools and algorithms used to visualize and pre-process the data are described. Further, this paper reports on how naturalistic cycling data can enable novel safety analyses by mirroring previous analyses on naturalistic driving data. Finally, this paper offers some lessons learned from our current experience in collecting and analysing naturalistic cycling data and suggests future safety analyses and development for the naturalistic cycling methodology.