Active Safety for car-to-bicyclist accidents

During the last years the rapid development of countermeasures has led to an overall decreasing number of fatalities in road traffic accidents. However, the positive trend does not hold at the same rate for bicyclists. It is therefore desireable to investigate these type of accidents and discuss possible countermeasures. In this work the car-to-bicyclist accidents were studied to understand the context in which they occur. Data was collected from the German In-Depth Accident Study (GIDAS) database and the Pre-Crash Matrix (PCM) extension which contained reconstructed accidents. A geometrical classification method was developed to find the most common type of accident scenarios and descriptive statistics was gathered. Further on, a risk model was derived to find the probability of an accident to result in severe injuries. The model was also used to calculate the theoretical effectiveness of a simplified Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) system. The study showed that the most common car-to-bicyclist accidents were lateral and longitudinal scenarios in intersections, where the car was travelling straight forward. This was also connected to the risk analysis which showed that the most risk in uencing parameter was the impact speed of the car in the collision. Finally, the effectiveness study indicated that AEB has a considerable potential to mitigate car-to-bicyclist accidents.