Open Collections

Kamel, Mohamed

University of British Columbia

Many cities are promoting biking to develop more sustainable and livable communities and improve public health. However, cyclists are vulnerable road users with elevated injury and fatality risks compared to vehicles' drivers and passengers. Although some studies have investigated biking ridership and cyclist-vehicle crash risk on the macro-level, these studies suffer from several limitations and research gaps that need to be addressed. Therefore, this research focuses on addressing key issues related to the development of macro-level models for evaluating biking attractiveness and safety, including 1) assessing the effects of zonal characteristics (e.g., bike network and land use) on cyclist-vehicle crashes while accounting for their effects on bike exposure, 2) developing novel network variables and assess their impact on Bike Kilometers Travelled (BKT) and cyclist-vehicle crashes, 3) developing safety models that account for the measurement error in traffic exposure measures, 4) accounting for the effect of seasonality on cyclist-vehicle crashes, and 5) developing a comprehensive zone-based index to represent both biking attractiveness and cyclists’ crash risk. The models and indices developed in this research are based on 134 Traffic Analysis Zones in Vancouver, Canada. The results show that 1) several zonal characteristics have opposite direct effects and total effects (direct effect plus effects through bike exposure) on cyclist-vehicle crashes, 2) BKT and cyclist-vehicle crash models showed significant associations with novel bike network variables such as centrality, assortativity, and complexity, 3) accounting for the measurement error of the traffic exposure measures in cyclist-vehicle crash models significantly enhanced model fit, 4) accounting for seasonality improves the fit of cyclist-vehicle crash models and captures the change of zonal characteristics’ impact on crashes through different seasons, and 5) the correlation between the developed Bike Attractiveness Index and Bike Safety Index is low, which highlights the need for a comprehensive index that includes biking attractiveness and safety.

Text

2021-11-23

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/80247

Civil Engineering

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/