David Hurwitz, OSU College of Engineering OSU simulated bike safety with various intersection design improvements, including the ‘bike box’ CORVALLIS, Ore. (KTVZ) – A roadway setup known as the “bike box,” a painted-off area for bicyclists at the front of an intersection, can help them stay safe at urban, signalized intersections, research by the Oregon State University College of Engineering indicates.
The findings , published in Accident Analysis & Prevention, are important because the number of cyclists killed in collisions with motor vehicles is on the rise, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, and nearly half of all bicycle-car crashes happen at intersections.
In 2020, the latest year for which numbers are available, 932 bicyclists in the United States were killed in collisions with motor vehicles, the agency’s data show – an 8.9% increase from the 856 killed in 2019. And according to the National Safety Council, another group that tracks bicycle fatality data, deaths from bicycle transportation incidents have increased 44% in the last decade.
David Hurwitz, a transportation engineering professor at Oregon State, and Logan Scott-Deeter, a civil engineering graduate research assistant, led the study in conjunction with Brendan Russo of Northern Arizona University.
The project employed a bicycling simulator that replicates traffic conditions to examine the safety enhancement ability of three types of intersection treatments – a mixing zone, bicycle signals and the bike box.
In a mixing zone, the bike lane goes away just before an intersection and is replaced by other lane markings including “sharrows” that indicate […]
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