On assessing road safety aspects of a cycling router application

Abstract

Cycling in cities can be dangerous and, therefore, routing applications for cyclists should consider road safety aspects in their route suggestions. Thereby, cyclists are able to avoid accident hot spots easily. However, designing and implementing such applications is only one part of the developing process. Additionally, a proper assessment is required in order to make sure road safety is improved by the given solution. In this paper, we give an insight in our way of assessing road safety aspects of a routing application for cyclists. We utilize microscopic traffic simulation in combination with a sophisticated measuring tool for road safety based on real accident data. It is shown, that the provided prototype of a cycling router is able to avoid accident hot spots and therefore increases road safety for their users.