Evaluation of Cycling Safety and Comfort in Bad Weather and Surface Conditions Using an Instrumented Bicycle

Understanding how vulnerable road users (cyclists and pedestrians) behave enables the construction of better roadways with adapted geometric and surface design which leads to improve cycling safety and comfort. This study examines the behavior of cyclists using an instrumented city bicycle that allows collecting exact data about bicycle dynamics, trajectory, and speed, as well as essential information to study the behavior of the cyclists, their reaction to the different features of the road surface and geometric design, and their interaction with other road users such as pedestrians, vehicles and other cyclists. 22 cyclists participated in an experiment following a predetermined route in Stockholm, Sweden. The route consisted of a circuit with different types of cycling facilities in order to study the different interactions (cyclist-car and cyclist-pedestrian), the circuit was divided into 3 zones: the first is mixed traffic, the second is a separate cycling lane and the third is shared pedestrian-cycling path. The results show significant data to evaluate cycling safety and comfort in snowy weather conditions and the perception-reaction behavior of cyclists; accordingly, the infrastructure-related risks were evaluated from subjective and objective points of view. In this paper, we propose a new concept to evaluate cycling behavior. This concept allows us to evaluate cyclists’ behavior through the calculation of Behavioral Risk Indicator (BRI) based on different risk factors owing to weather, road and traffic conditions, interaction with other road users and reaction to infrastructure drawbacks. The applications of the proposed concept allow us to evaluate the risks caused by multiple traffic factors and infrastructural drawbacks and study cyclist–bicycle–road interactions and their influences on cycling safety. In addition, the concept provides a new foundation for establishing cycling safety measures that could be applied to improve the infrastructure and reduce traffic accidents in order to attract more people to ride bicycles.