Rethinking Bicycle Infrastructure for Safer Communities
by Samantha Kloft
Content
Story by Samantha Kloft, UMass Amherst Public Writing Fellow
Growing up in Taipei, Taiwan, Yu-Min (Thomas) Yang spent hours watching subway trains pass by his home. He was such a fan of Thomas the Tank Engine that when it came time to choose an English name in school, the decision was easy. Years later, that childhood fascination has grown into something much bigger: doctoral research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst dedicated to improving how people move through their communities.
Today, Yang is a PhD student in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at UMass, where his research focuses on micromobility and transportation safety. He was drawn to UMass because of its large transportation research community and the opportunity to work with cutting-edge equipment and faculty. As more people choose bicycles for transportation, exercise, and convenience, communities are expanding bicycle infrastructure without always knowing which designs work best. For Yang, that raises an important question: How can cities design bicycle infrastructure that keeps everyone safer?
Yang's path to that question began before he arrived at UMass. After earning bachelor's and master's degrees in Transportation and Logistics Management in Taiwan, he spent a year working for the Taiwan Highway Bureau, where the country's traffic safety concerns reshaped his career goals. Instead of focusing only on making transportation systems more efficient, he became increasingly interested in their human consequences.
"One fatality does not mean just one life lost," Yang says. "It means a family or a community."
Every bike lane represents a series of design decisions. Should bicyclists ride alongside vehicle traffic or behind a physical barrier? How should bike lanes interact with bus stops? Which designs reduce conflicts among bicyclists, pedestrians, buses, and cars?
Yang's dissertation seeks to develop methods that cities can use to evaluate those choices. By studying how people move and interact in different spaces, he hopes to identify which bicycle infrastructure designs work best for specific environments. His goal is to give transportation planners clearer evidence about how much one design improves upon another before communities commit money and space to construction.
Finding that evidence takes Yang out of the lab and onto the streets. Some fieldwork days begin with a 4 a.m. drive to Boston, where he and his research team use drones and LiDAR sensors to capture how bicyclists, pedestrians, and vehicles move through different types of infrastructure.
One focus has been floating bus stops, which separate buses from bicycle lanes but introduce new points of interaction between bicyclists and pedestrians. Yang has studied these designs in Boston and Washington, D.C., including a two-week stretch in Washington collecting data for as many as 12 hours a day. Across his fieldwork, he has amassed roughly 200 hours of observations and nearly 20 terabytes of data.
The research has also drawn interest from the agencies making these decisions. Yang's team has connected with transportation officials in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., while Somerville expressed interest in the findings as the city continued upgrading its bicycle infrastructure.
Yang is also bringing what he sees on the street back to UMass. As part of his dissertation, he is helping build the university's first bicycle simulator, allowing researchers to recreate situations that would be difficult or dangerous to test on an actual road. By pairing those controlled experiments with observations from real streets, Yang hopes to better understand not just how bicycle infrastructure is designed, but how people actually experience it.
Conducting research in communities has also changed the way Yang thinks about transportation. While collecting data, he often spoke with people who stopped to ask about his research or share their experiences with new roadway designs. Some struggled to adjust to the changes or found aspects of the designs inconvenient, reminding Yang that people can experience the same transportation environment very differently.
Research by his advisor involving people with visual impairments reinforced that lesson, introducing Yang to transportation needs he says he had not fully considered before coming to UMass. Those experiences have made him increasingly interested in how researchers and transportation agencies can incorporate community perspectives into new designs.
"Biking is a good transportation mode for a ton of reasons, but it's our work as traffic engineers to build a safer environment, not just for bicyclists, but for everyone," he says.
Yang says that perspective has been reinforced by the collaborative environment at UMass. Transportation engineering students share office space, making it easy to exchange ideas, compare research methods, and learn from one another. Building the bicycle simulator has also introduced him to hardware, sensors, and mechanical systems that he never expected to explore when he began graduate school.
"It's not just learning the techniques or the skills you have in your own department," Yang says. "You also have more experience to learn things that might not even be in your mind initially."
Outside the lab, Yang has embraced life in Western Massachusetts. After growing up in the bustling city of Taipei, he appreciates the area's quieter pace and natural surroundings. Adjusting to life without a car and experiencing snow for the first time took time, but Amherst has become a place where he enjoys both the research community and the environment.
As he looks beyond graduate school, Yang hopes to continue working in transportation safety, whether in academia or industry. An internship with the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety introduced him to research opportunities outside the university and expanded his vision for the future. Regardless of where his career takes him, his goal remains the same: helping communities make better-informed transportation decisions.
"When you see the facility design that you created has been implemented on the road and you see people using it, I think that's the happiest thing for us because that means our research is actually working," he says.
For Yang, that vision has been years in the making. What began with watching trains from his childhood home has evolved into a career dedicated to helping communities create safer, more thoughtful transportation systems.