Nudging bicyclists towards a safer behavior -Experiences from the MeBeSafe project

Paper in proceeding, 2020

The European union’s official cycling strategy states that bicycle use should increase by 50 percent in ten years while at the same time halving the amount of deaths (ECF, 2019). It is therefore highly important to find safety increasing measures that are both acceptable for bicyclists and that actually work. The Horizon 2020 project MeBeSafe is investigating if nudging can be a fruitful way towards safer traffic behaviour of car and truck drivers, as well as cyclists. This paper reports on a series of quasi-experimental studies that investigated if nudging can affect bicyclists’ speed as well as trajectory. The project has so far showed that visual nudges have a great potential for affecting speed and trajectory, while haptic nudges seems to have little effect.