Aliaksei Laureshyn, LU
Vad behövs för att lyckas med ambitionen om ökad och säker cykling?
– How to get more and safer cycling? My answer is better infrastructure and its maintenance. Most Swedish cities have already quite well-connected cycling networks, but now it is time to work on the details – wider space allowing overtaking, better separation from cars and pedestrians, clear markings and re-thinking of priorities at intersection points, speed calming and other restrictions for car traffic. I don’t have much faith in campaigns with ‘Cycle more!’-message. Instead, it should be objectively more convenient and faster to take a bike compared to any other transport mode.
My name is Aliaksei Laureshyn and I am docent in road safety in Transport & Roads at Lund University. I have been working all my professional carrier with the subject of pro-active (i.e. before-accidents-happen) safety assessments. Together with computer vision researchers, I developed and evaluated various video analysis tools for traffic-related applications, particularly for safety and behaviour studies of vulnerable road users. My research team pushes the Swedish traffic conflict technique (originally developed at Lund University in 1980s) to the next level, making it an automated and objective method that actually can be applied on a large scale.
The challenge with studying traffic conflicts with cyclists is that they behave very differently compared to cars – swerve rather than brake to avoid collisions, choose ‘creative’ paths and come from unexpected directions, easily break the rules when it is convenient and perceived as safe. For a researcher, it requires more elaborated safety indicators to account for the differences and revision of the threshold that separate conflict situations from ‘normal’ traffic interactions.
