MicroTraffic, together with leading cities and bicycle researchers in Canada and the US, are participating in FNI’s 200-site cross-sectional surrogate safety study of right turns at bicycle lanes that aims to provide quantitative clarification and optimization of design guidance for these conflict locations.
If you are a traffic safety engineer or a cyclist, you know that any location where vehicles turn right across a bike lane can be a serious injury crash waiting to happen.
In response to a 600% increase in protected bicycle lanes over a 10 year period in the US, NACTO released “Don’t Give Up at the Intersection“, which is a free resource outlining treatments that can make the right turn vs bicycle lane conflict zone safer. Many other ITE and NCHRP resources have recently come out summarizing practices and strategies in this area. However, there is a serious lack of empirical data on the quantitative elements that would guide design decisions at different facility types and traffic volumes. One of the NACTO guide team members reached out to us to start generating surrogate safety data to fill this data gap, leading to the current study.
Fireseeds North Infrastructure (FNI), using MicroTraffic technology, is now leading an independent, pooled fund, and open source study to solve the empirical data deficiency around the bike right-hook safety problem. With participating cities and industry partners, we are creating a massive open source cross-sectional database of near-misses across at least 200 locations with bicycle lane vs right turn vehicle conflicts. This database will be shared with NACTO, University groups, all participating cities, all current and future NCHRP project panels working on bicycle safety, and with connected / automated vehicle companies.
