Workshop TR 5.2, Wednesday 21 June, 16.00 - 17.30

New approaches to safety

Johan Diepens Roelof  Wittink, Director, I-ce Interface for Cycling Expertise I-ce Safety and vulnerability of cycling; The interdependency between mobility and safety In the framework of road safety policy, cyclists and  pedestrians are considered to be vulnerable road users. This kind of presentation is often accompanied by a warning that promotion of cycling and walking may result in an increase of traffic deaths. Although the additional message may be that measures are needed to improve the safety of cycling (and walking), the wrong conclusion could be that first safety standards should be improved before cycling is to be promoted. The core question that will be raised in this contribution is: "Can measures that improve the safety of cycling, be isolated from provisions that contribute to a higher share of cycling in traffic and transport?". The current safety of cycling will be reviewed. Then the interdependence between safety and mobility of cycling will be analyzed. Conclusions will be drawn about the best approach to enhance the safety of cycling.

Tony Dufays Thérèse Steenberghen & Tony Dufays, Ground for GIS (GfG), Cath. University of Leuven - R&D, Belgium Impact of spatial planning on sustainable traffic safety, Belgian situation analysis This paper presents the preliminary results of  research where road safety is analyzed in terms of the balance between land-use and road infrastructure. The assumption is that different neighborhoods have their own carrying capacity for traffic. The unsafety of neighborhoods is examined using the number of accidents related to the balance between land-uses and road types. This unsafety indicator is a key to evaluate the success/failure of integration of the road network in the surrounding neighborhood, and is intended as policy tool. The relevance of scale and size of the neighborhoods, fragmentation of the land uses, and this in relation with the mesh-width of the road network, are examined as well. Bicycles were involved in more than 1/3 of all accidents in the first case study made in this research. In the analysis of high accident ratios in specific land uses/road types, till now, two explanatory elements were found: - The mix of different transport modes seems to be an important element of the explanation of the accidents. - The combination of through traffic and local traffic seems to be another explanatory element for high accident ratios. Both of these two explanations basically could be reduced to one, namely the difference in speed between the different road users. The paper will emphasize on the accidents with cyclists, in relation with their use in the different analyzed cases (major cities, rural areas, …), and compared to the other types of accidents.