This week, new research discovered that roundabouts are overrepresented in bike accidents.
Dutch site visitors bureau VIA checked out registered accidents at intersections that concerned cyclists between 2014 and 2021. It discovered a lot of the intersection bike crashes within the Netherlands happen at roundabouts. Particularly, 12% of the whole bike crashes concerned intersections or nearly one in eight.
Roundabouts are designed to enhance site visitors movement — notably for automotive drivers — by eradicating cease indicators and site visitors lights. They scale back the variety of battle factors between highway customers, and the pace of autos at intersections.
VIA Site visitors skilled Erik Donkers instructed Het Parool that with ebikes, cyclists now not transfer on the similar pace. This makes it tougher for drivers to gauge whether or not they have time to enter the intersection:
“A roundabout is extra sophisticated anyway: as a highway consumer you’ve got 4 battle factors. If a automotive hits a bicycle on a roundabout, even at low pace, issues rapidly go flawed.”
He means that the answer is altering present guidelines relating to precedence at roundabouts, which now favor these on bicycles.
“Reversing the proper of method offers the bike owner extra duty and presumably prevents a false sense of security.”
Present analysis gives an incomplete image of the bike owner roundabout expertise
In 2021, Niranjan Poudel & Patrick A. Singleton performed a literature review of 49 completely different research of bicycles and roundabouts.
For instance, in 2008, researchers in Belgium found that their set up led to a 27% enhance in “bicyclist damage collisions” and a rise of 40% in extreme or deadly damage crashes involving cyclists.
Nonetheless, Poudel & Singleton be aware that many research solely analyze bicycle crash information or observe driver/bike owner behaviors and interactions, which supply an incomplete image of biking.
Additional, just a few researchers surveyed cyclists’ security perceptions. For instance, cyclists could keep away from intersections as a result of they understand them as tough to navigate or unsafe, and researchers ought to characterize this of their information.
Nonetheless, their analysis means that higher-speed, multi-lane roundabouts are the worst for cyclists.
When cyclists “take the lane” and function like autos, they’re extra prone to expertise difficulties with coming into drivers who could have “regarded however did not see” (and thus did not yield to) the bike owner.
The researchers contend that the most secure roundabouts are small with bigger or increased central islands, single lanes, low site visitors speeds, and a low quantity of motorcar site visitors.
New lessons of autos could create novel challenges for highway concord
Highway challenges are coming earlier than we even consider autonomous autos. The subsequent decade forecasts an inflow of two-, three-, and four-wheel mild electrical autos from ebikes to autocycles.
Most are far smaller than normal vehicles (EV or ICE) and function in another way. Some can solely journey in bike lanes, and others have free rein.
They could expertise among the similar challenges as cyclists when interacting with automotive drivers. Australian bike and motorbike riders use the expression SMIDSY (Sorry mate, I didn’t see you) as a typical problem in sharing the highway with drivers. And because the roads get extra various, how we navigate them may have a re-evaluation
