Modeling cyclist acceleration process for bicycle traffic simulation using naturalistic data

Abstract

Cycling is a healthy and sustainable form of transportation. The recent increase of daily cyclists in Sweden has triggered broad interest in finding how policies and measures may facilitate the planning of bicycle traffic in the urban area. However, in comparison to car traffic, bicycle traffic is still far from well understood. This study is part of the research effort to investigate microscopic cyclist behavior, model bicycle traffic and finally build a simulation tool for applications in transport planning. In particular, the paper focuses on representing bicycle movements when the cyclist doesn't interact with others. The cyclist acceleration behavior is modeled using naturalistic GPS data collected by eleven recruited commuter cyclists. After filtering the large amount of data, cyclist trajectories are obtained and acceleration profiles are abstracted. A mathematical model is proposed based on the dataset, and three model forms are estimated using the maximum likelihood method with Laplace and Normal error terms. While the model with more parameters shows superior performance, the simplified ones are still capable of capturing the trends in the acceleration profiles. On the other hand, the study also introduces social economic characteristics of cyclists to explain the model parameters and they show significant effects. However, the cyclist population being investigated in the study is still limited, and more convincing results can be obtained when the data collection effort is extended to larger population with more variable cyclist characteristics.

Analysing cyclist behaviour at cycling facility discontinuities using video data

“…More recently GPS and video data are being used to gather more in depth information such as location, speed, trajectory and safety measures (Li, Xiong, Li, Liu, & Zhang, 2015;Ma & Luo, 2016;Mereu, 2015;Zaki, Sayed, & Cheung, 2013;Zangenehpour, Strauss, Miranda-Moreno, & Saunier, 2016). Most of these studies extracted location and speed measurements manually from GPS or video data.…”

Cycling-Net

“…Then, researchers began to model cyclist behavior with longitudinal analysis on weather and bicycle count variability data [19] and statistical analysis on the mixed trac at signalized intersections [14]. As technology advanced, some microscopic simulation models and tools have been proposed for intelligent transport systems [3,9,16]. Particularly,the hardware and software implementations in [3] can provide a quantitative description of bicycle dynamics to measure cycling kinematics and bicyclist behavior.…”

“…Particularly,the hardware and software implementations in [3] can provide a quantitative description of bicycle dynamics to measure cycling kinematics and bicyclist behavior. Bicycling simulation in [16] focuses on representing bicycle movements when the cyclist does not interact with others, while Huang et al took other road users into consideration using social force model [9].…”

A Cyclist Traffic Simulation and Analysis Tool

“…The author observe and analyze the left turn behavior of cyclists at different types of signalized intersections in the City of Toronto with the intent of recommending what facilities are most effective. In [16] the authors present a detailed study that explores and models cyclist behavior with real naturalistic data instead of only experimental data. A main contribution of the paper is the acceleration model proposed for representing the longitudinal movement of cyclist both in men and women.…”