Cyclist-car accidents: their consequences for cyclists and typical accident scenarios

The structure of the official German statistics does not permit in-depth analyses to be carried out, so the German Insurers Accident Research (UDV) built up a set of representative case material in order to examine accidents between cars and cyclists in more detail and derive effective measures to improve the safety of cyclists. This material was formed from accidents with personal injury from the years 2002 to 2010 that were covered by motor third-party insurance and involved injury and damage costs of 15,000 euros or more. The cyclist accident material consists of a total of 407 accidents between cars and cyclists. This paper describes how and under what circumstances cyclist-car accidents occur, the maximum levels of injury severity sustained by the cyclists and the impact constellations that occur particularly frequently. In 84% of the cases, the impact between the bicycle and the car occurred at the front part of the vehicle (the front of the car plus the left- and right-hand front wings). In 42% of these cases, the bicycle was coming from the right (as seen by the driver), and in 34% of the cases from the left. Moreover, the analysis of the cyclist-car accidents revealed that the average speed of the cars was a relatively low 24 km/h. The speed of the cyclists often could not be ascertained from the available documents. However, it is known from the UDV’s measurements of the speeds of 20,000 cyclists that they travel at an average speed of 18.6 km/h. Three typical scenarios were obtained from the accident material that together account for 42% of all cyclist-car accidents. These three scenarios are “car traveling straight ahead, cyclist coming from the right” (15%), “car turning right, cyclist coming from the right” (15%) and “car traveling straight ahead, cyclist coming from the left” (12%). Another key finding is that the collisions in these three scenarios often (in 47% to 85% of the cases) took place at the entries to or exits from properties or parking lots and at junctions. The findings described make it possible both to work out the requirements that have to be met by future systems for preventing cyclist-car accidents and to design effective test procedures.