"Assessing the Effectiveness of Bicycle Infrastructure Treatments through a Large-Scale Trajectories collected with Drones" is a comprehensive study designed to evaluate the safety implications of various bicycle infrastructure treatments, such as bike lanes, protected bike lanes, bike boxes, and two-stage turn queue boxes in urban environments. Recognizing the limitations of current research methods that either focus on single intersections or rely on simulations and underreported crash data, this project proposes a novel approach using drones to collect extensive trajectories of all road users in signalized urban arterials. The two-fold objective of the study is to implement a large-scale experiment with drones to gather detailed modal trajectories and to utilize these data to develop surrogate safety measures for evaluating the impact of bicycle infrastructure treatments on bicyclist and motorist safety.
The research plan is structured around two primary questions: identifying effective surrogate safety metrics for bicycle treatments along arterials and understanding the influence of the continuity and density of bicycle infrastructure on road user behavior. The study will utilize drones to monitor areas with various bicycle infrastructure treatments, capturing the behavior of motorists and vulnerable road users, especially bicyclists. The drone flights, conducted by MobiLysis, will record traffic during peak periods on selected signalized arterials with diverse socioeconomic characteristics and bicycle demand. Trajectories extracted from drone footage will be analyzed to develop surrogate safety measures, correlating them with factors such as infrastructure type, connectivity, density, and road geometry.