Is that move safe? Case study of cyclist movements at intersections with cycling discontinuities

The cycling safety research literature has proposed methods to analyse safety and case studies to better understand the factors that lead to cyclist crashes. Surrogate measures of safety (SMoS) are being used as a proactive approach to identify severe interactions that do not result in an accident and interpreting them for a safety diagnosis. While most cyclist studies adopting SMoS have evaluated interactions by counting the total number of severe events per location, only a few have focused on the interactions between general directions of movement e.g. through cyclists and right turning vehicles. However, road users perform maneuvers that are more varied at a high spatiotemporal resolution such as a range of sharp to wide turning movements. These maneuvers (motion patterns) have not been considered in past studies as a basis for analysis to identify, among a range of possible motion patterns in each direction of travel, which ones are safer, and which are more likely to result in a crash. This paper presents a novel movement-based probabilistic SMoS approach to evaluate the safety of road users' trajectories based on clusters of trajectories representing the various movements. This approach is applied to cyclist-vehicle interactions at two locations of cycling network discontinuity and two control sites in Montréal. The Kruskal-Wallis and Kolmogorov-Smirnov tests are used to compare the time-to-collision (TTC) distribution between motion patterns in each site and between sites with and without a discontinuity. Results demonstrate the insight provided by the new approach and indicate that cyclist interactions are more severe and less safe at locations with a cycling network discontinuity and that cyclists following different movements have statistically different levels of safety.