Due to investments in cycling infrastructure and promotion of cycling as a green and healthy mode of transport, cycling gains popularity in many cities around the globe. These growing cycling levels lead to an increasing number of severe and fatal bicycle crashes, particularly in urban areas where more than half of the fatal crashes in the European Union occurred. Therefore, understanding the factors affecting bicycle safety in urban areas is crucial to improve the wellbeing of cyclists and further promote cycling as a sustainable and healthy mode of transport. This paper aims to contribute to safer urban cycling by examining bicycle crash risk factors in Dutch cities.
Bicycle crashes have a strong spatial and temporal character as these crashes tend to cluster at specific locations which is influenced by temporal variation in these crashes. It is therefore important to consider this heterogeneity of crashes in space and time when investigating bicycle safety. To address this nature of bicycle crashes, the current study uses a high-resolution spatiotemporal dataset with hourly variation in bicycle crashes and exposure metrics on each road section of the cycling network. Other examined risk factors are network structure, cycling infrastructure, speed limits, and proximity of popular destinations for cyclists. Moreover, to provide transferability of the results, the cycling networks of the four largest Dutch cities are analyzed simultaneously. [From Introduction]
