In Sweden, many different road users are mixed with different speed claims on pedestrian and cycle paths. Conflicts and incidents occur and sometimes they lead to collisions between road users. Accidents between unprotected road users may not be a major traffic safety problem rather a safety problem. About one percent of pedestrians who needed emergency care have been injured in a collision with a cyclist. Of all injured cyclists who seek emergency care, seven percent have been injured in a collision with another cyclist and one percent in a collision with mopeds and pedestrians. Also, cyclists' single accidents there are about ten percent who being forced to weigh for another road user. Differences in speed between the different categories of road users occurring on different types of cycle paths could be a cause of failure in interaction. Knowledge of the road users’ composition of pedestrian and cycling paths and their speed are not sufficient known. In addition to having an impact on the interaction with other road users and thus on safety, the speed has a strong link to the cyclists’ accessibility, which in turn can affect cyclists’ choice of route as the choice of travel mode. In this context, you need to distinguish between “travel speed” and “punctual speed” respectively. The travel speed is measured over a route, considering stops and other speed-setting obstacles, while the puncture speed is the speed at a certain point (i.e. past the measuring point). The purpose of this project is to enhance the understanding of cyclists’ speeds at the pedestrian and cycle paths, and if possible, to understand how the cyclists adapt speed to other road users and their environment. The focus is to study cyclists’ speed from a road safety perspective. The questions we would like to answer are: What is the average speed and speed distribution on walking and cycling paths? What is the composition of road users on the pedestrian and cycle paths? What speed claims do they have? How is the speed of cyclists affected by different factors like traffic flow and time? Has cyclists' speed changed over time? Three different types of data have been used; Speed and cycle flow data from previous measurements in the municipalities Eskilstuna, Linköping and Stockholm for a total of 18 locations.; New speed and cycle flow measurements in Linköping (4 locations) and Stockholm (1 location); Observation studies of road user type at the same five locations. In addition, we have also compiled some selected references. Based on both previously collected data and the new speed measurements, we can observe that the average speed of the cyclists past the measuring points varies between 15 and 25 kilometer per hour, sometimes with a substantial difference between directions. As expected, the lower average speeds depend largely on uphill, proximity to crossing or high pedestrian flow, while the higher average speeds are due to downhill and commute paths. About 70—95 percent of the road users observed on the pedestrian and cycle paths at our locations were cyclists, while roughly 5—30 percent were pedestrians. An extremely small proportion were moped riders, 0.2 percent. As for the type of bike, the comfort cycle was the most common, followed by trekking cycles. Electric bike occurred in all locations, but varied from 1 to 10 percent. Racer bikes also occurred in all locations, in between 1 and 15 percent. At the two locations where the highest shares of electric and race bikes were observed, comparatively high average speed was found. The result thus supports the hypothesis that electric and race cyclists have a higher speed claim. Another possible explanation may be that these paths have higher proportions of commuting cyclists. (Author/publisher)
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