Road facilities in urban areas are a major source of injury for nonmotorized road users despite the benefits of nonmotorized transportation. In particular, large Canadian cities such as Montreal face serious problems with pedestrian and cyclist safety. To address these problems, funds are continually allocated through different safety improvement programs such as reduction of speed limits, improvement of intersections, and increased traffic enforcement. However, few analytical tools help to identify and quantify the benefits of countermeasures (e.g., roadway design, speed management strategies, or land use policies) in reducing accident frequency and severity. Injury severity models were developed to determine the effects of road design, built environment, speed limits, and other factors (e.g., vehicle characteristics and movement type) on injury severity levels of pedestrians and cyclists involved in collisions with motor vehicles. Sources of data included police reports describing vehicle–pedestrian and vehicle–cyclist collisions, as well as information on land use, transit network, and road design attributes from the city of Montreal. The impacts of road design, land use, built environment, and other strategies on the injury severity levels of vulnerable road users were investigated. Factors such as darkness, vehicle movement, whether an accident occurred at an intersection, vehicle type, and land use mix affected the severity of pedestrian injuries from collisions. For cyclists, however, only vehicle movement and whether the accident occurred at a signalized intersection had significant effects on the severity of the injury.
This paper proposes a new approach to represent cyclist risk exposure. This approach considers disaggregate motor vehicle and cyclist flows and develops cyclist injury frequency models. Three definitions of risk exposure were used in this research, including aggregated flows, motor vehicle flows aggregated by movement type, and potential conflicts between motor vehicles and cyclists. As an application environment, a large sample of signalized intersections on the island of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, was used, along with data that comprised disaggregate motor vehicle and cyclist flows. Several negative binomial models were fitted to the data. This study showed that cyclist collisions were sensitive to changes in both cyclist and motor vehicle flows. A 10% increase in bicycle flow was associated with a 4.4% increase in the frequency of cyclist injuries. A 10% increase in the total number of motor vehicles that passed through the intersection would result in a 3.4% increase in cyclist injury occurrence. When motor vehicle flows were considered on the basis of movement type, right-turn movements had a great effect on injury occurrence. Similar results, which identified right turns as having the greatest effect on cyclist injuries, were produced when the impact of potential conflicts was determined. The number of bus stops in the proximity of the intersection increased cyclist injury occurrence. Some geometric design factors, such as the presence of a median, parking entrance, and the number of intersection legs, were tested. The effect, however, was found to be statistically nonsignificant.
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