Although cycling has environmental and health benefits, the large number of cyclists who sustain injuries or die in a traffic accident is a matter of concern. In recent years, about 10% of the road deaths in the Netherlands concern cyclists who collided with a passenger car (around 60 cyclists a year) and even more cyclists got seriously injured. More knowledge about the factors and circumtances in which bicycle-car accidents occur could help to prevent this type of accidents. Therefore, a thorough analysis was conducted of 22 Dutch bicycle-car accidents, which were part of the data collection for the European SaferWheels-project. The SaferWheels-project, carried out on behalf of the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport of the European Commision, included the collection of accident causation data of 500 accidents with Powered Two Wheelers (PTWs) and bicycles. Teams from France, Greece, Italy, Poland, The Netherlands and the United Kingdom cooperated together in this project, which was designed according to the defined methodology in the DaCoTA-project. The resulting dataset contains 94 bicycle-car1 accidents, of which 22 took place in the Netherlands. This paper will discuss the general characteristics and the contributory crash and injury factors of these 22 bicycle-car accidents. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting