Cyclists interacting with passenger cars; A study of real world crashes

Paper in proceeding, 2015

A growth in the number of cyclists was observed over the past decades. At the same time, cyclists account for a large share of injured road users. Crash data analysis for safety priorities, design of safety systems and development of effectiveness assessment methods for cyclist safety should be based on relevant and representative datasets of real world crashes. This study presents descriptive statistics and cyclist injury risk estimations from Volvo Cars Cyclist Accident Database that provides up-to-date distributions of conflict situations, crash configurations as well as cyclist characteristics and driver information. The most dominant conflict situations with MAIS2+ injured cyclists were 'Straight Crossing Path' scenarios, 'Car Turning when Cyclist approaching from Opposite Direction' and 'Cyclist hit an opening car door when passing by' (dooring). The most common crash configurations were 'car front to cyclist side', 'cyclist front to car side', 'car front to cyclist front' and 'dooring' in that order. The body parts with the highest risk for serious injuries were the torso and the lower extremities followed by the head. When adding moderate injuries, the highest risk for injuries was found in the upper extremities. The results of the analysis aim at prioritize and develop active, integrated and passive safety countermeasures in car to cyclist crashes.