Publication

Even though cycling is slowly starting to get recognised as the sustainable mode of transport it is, this is mostly limited to short trips in urban areas. However, also in rural environments the bicycle has potential to replace the car for many trips. Best practice and research findings from urban areas cannot necessarily be directly applied to the rural environment, as preconditions can differ substantially. Speeds are higher, most interactions are longitudinal, the road is often shared, and the trip purposes and road users are likely to have different characteristics. This is also reflected in the differences in crash typology for rural and urban environments.

This project aimed at further describing conflicts on rural roads between motorists and active travellers in a Swedish context by analysing crash statistics. The development of a logger that provides measurements of overtaking and oncoming passes in detail and can in the future then be used to quantify the context for situations that do not result in a (documented) collision. This way, collisions can be put into perspective for example in relation to the context (road type, speed limit, average annual daily traffic, etc.).

Objective and reliable measurements of longitudinal interactions between motorists and active road users – namely overtaking and oncoming passes – are one important ingredient to assessing the current situation and the effectiveness of potential countermeasures. The measurement devices used in research so far are usually custom-built and the data reduction process is often not fully transparent. Within this project, we built an expandable device for logging the lateral distance to overtaking and oncoming vehicles and the approach speed of overtaking vehicles. The process to extract the passing occasions and the correct overtaking distance is made available as open source.

The methodology is planned to be used in future projects aiming at improving the situation for active travel on rural roads.