News

Mobilizing Europe’s Green Ambition through Bicycles and Intelligent Transport Systems is the full title of our most recent SAFER associated project. The project aims to contributing with scientific understanding to enable a safe transition to sustainable mobility.

In MegaBITS, ITS solutions for increased and safe bicycling will be implemented and evaluated in five different flagship cities; the city of Copenhagen, the city of Antwerp, the city of Hamburg, the city and region of Le Havre, and the region of OverIjssel with its cities Zwolle and Enschede. Each city will focus on a specific theme, e.g. a smart cycling corridor or smart traffic lights.

The MegaBITS project is a continuation of the very successful BITS project. Data on cyclist behaviour will be collected, both from the infrastructure and floating bike data. Open data through the Cycle Data Hub as well as the already existing BITS directory with good practices will ensure usefulness outside of the project.

Cycling - a key to sustainability
A modal shift to green transport is urgently needed as congestion, pollution, growing population and health problems threaten the livability in urban areas. Cycling has proven to be a major solution for these challenges. Not only as separate mode, but also as a part of the multimodal transport system. To be successful in the transition to a more sustainable transport system, safety is an important part of the research and more cycling data is needed to effectively position cycling within the multimodal transport system.

Building a useful network
MegaBITS is an Interreg project supported by the North Sea Programme of the European Regional Development Fund of the European Union. The project is relevant for SAFER as it targets the goal of increased safe cycling. Moreover, the project will create new networks between SAFER researchers, cities and regions with great skills in cycling as well as the cycling industry, that can be useful to create future projects and knowledge exchange in this domain.

The project started in May 2023 and is aiming to be concluded in April 2025. The active SAFER partner is Chalmers, and Cycleurope as well as  Hövding are also connected to the project. 4.9 MEUR is the complete budget (2.9 MEUR funding). Chalmers part of the project is 320.000EUR (192.000EUR funded). MegaBITS will be hosted by SAFER’s Road user behaviour research area.

Contributions to several SAFER targets
The project contribute to knowledge building across several of SAFER’s research targets:

• We can evaluate different ways to act in the traffic situation and decide upon how to progress safe and efficiently.
• We can study road user behaviour in their door-to-door travels.
• We can insure a safe interaction between automated vehicle and vulnerable road users in cooperation with Systems for Accident prevention and Automated driving.
• We have developed several nudge-based solutions and evaluated them.
• We can define and measure several user experience indicators to contribute to safety.