A novel method to monitor bicycling environments

Abstract

A bicycle is a promising human-powered and emission-free transportation mode to address growing transportation and environmental problems. Bike-friendly environments should be constructed to innovatively increase the use of bicycles as a significant transportation mode. From this perspective, the scientific and effective monitoring of bicycling environments is of keen interest. An important technical challenge for monitoring is to evaluate the performance of bicycling environments. This study proposes a novel monitoring method that can be used for evaluating bicycle performance in terms of safety and mobility. An instrumented probe bicycle (IPB), which is equipped with a set of sensors including a global positioning systems (GPS) receiver, accelerometer, and gyro sensor, was used to develop the proposed monitoring method. The IPB provides useful bicycle maneuvering data for identifying longitudinal, lateral, and vertical maneuverings of the bicycle, which are affected by environmental factors such as heavy vehicle volume, surface conditions, grade, crossings, humps, and curbs. Regarding safety monitoring, an index to predict bicyclist's perceived safety and comfort with the predictors derived from the measurements by the IPB was developed. A questionnaire survey was conducted to obtain actual responses from bicyclists for perceived safety and comfort during the field experiment. In addition, a method to evaluate the bicycle mobility using GPS speed data was devised. Then, a fault tree analysis (FTA) technique, which is a well-known technique for risk analysis, was adopted to integrate safety and mobility monitoring. As a result, the bicycling monitoring index (BMI) was proposed. Data derived from the proposed method is expected to be effectively used for promoting the bicycle use by supporting the development and evaluation of various bicycle-related policies. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.