Wider view over bicycle crashes: Complementing and extending bicycle crash statistics in urban areas using surveys

Introduction: In pursuit of sustainability goals, many cities are introducing measures to increase the usage of bicycles as a means of transportation. City planners aim to ensure that this increase does not lead to an increase in crashes, but must make corresponding infrastructure decisions with limited information. Sufficient data to perform a statistical analysis of location-specific crash frequencies is rarely available. For example, only approximately 10% of all bicycle crashes are reported to the police (Shinar et al., 2018). Therefore, urban planners often rely on expert opinion, which may lead to suboptimal prioritization and realization of infrastructure improvements.

Method: This paper demonstrates how surveys on bicycle crashes can be used to aid urban planners in making infrastructure decisions. In addition to confirming the location and characteristics of reported crashes, surveys can uncover characteristics of crashes that are not reported to the police, situations in which a crash almost occurred, and locations perceived by cyclists to be dangerous. Surveys also allow urban planners to investigate non-infrastructure related causes of crashes, such as the frequency with which individual cyclists use other modes of transportation.

Practical applications: The usefulness of surveys in the determination of urban cycling safety is demonstrated in this paper through analysis of survey results from the city of Zurich in 2018.