An international project to map cycling safety is setting up pilots in five cities.
It is a cooperation between the International Road Assessment Programme (iRAP), the non-profit institution Fundación MAPFRE and the Union Cyclist Internationale and is designed to test the new risk assessment model CycleRAP.
The Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona, Bogota in Colombia, Sao Paulo in Brazil, and Fayetteville in the US have been chosen for the pilots, working with local partners to assess how safe their roads and cycle paths are for cycling and other forms of micromobility.
It is the first application of CycleRAP in Spain and outside Europe.
It aims to reduce crashes and improve safety for cyclists by identifying high risk locations without the need for crash data.
The model uses information about the features of a road, street or path to evaluate the risk of crashes for bicyclists and light mobility users, pinpointing and mapping where crashes are likely to occur, offering suggestions for treatments to reduce this risk.
PTV will work with one of the cities on the visualisation of the results and evaluate infrastructure improvements.
Using PTV Model2Go, a supply model of the city will be generated using OpenStreetMap data for a detailed urban bicycle network configuration.
The CycleRAP analysis will then be applied in the multimodal network and analysis platform, PTV Visum.
“The bicycle stands for modern climate-friendly mobility," said Sofia Salek de Braun, PTV road safety ambassador. "It’s efficient, ecofriendly, affordable and healthy. But unfortunately, cyclists are exposed to high risks, which is holding people back from using it as an alternative means of transport."
Results from the pilots will be revealed at the UCI Mobility and Bike City Forum on 25-26 October 2023 in Bruges, Belgium.
The project aims to create a knowledge base to help cities replicate the approaches and improve safety of their cycling infrastructure.
CycleRAP was launched at the Velo-City Conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, and the ITF Safer City Streets Network in Guadalajara, Mexico, last year.
