Interactive visualizations for assessing car-to-bicycle overtaking manoeuvres
Hannah Wies, Moritz Beeking, Karl Rehrl (2024): Interactive visualizations for assessing car-to-bicycle overtaking manoeuvres In: Abstr. Int. Cartogr. Assoc., 7, 186
Cycling has been acknowledged by the European Commission through the Declaration on Cycling as a healthy and sustainable mode of transport to be encouraged (European Commission, 2023a). However, in the past decade (2010-2020), the number of cycling fatalities in Europe did not decrease compared to other modes of transport (European Commission, 2023b) and missing bicycle infrastructure enhances accident risk (European Commission, 2022). When sharing the road, motorized vehicles pose a potential safety risk when overtaking bicyclists (Rasch et al., 2022). Numerous studies investigate overtaking manoeuvres by equipping bicycles with dedicated sensors, such as cameras, laser rangefinders, ultrasonic or LiDAR sensors (Beck et al., 2021; Dozza et al., 2016; López et al., 2020; Louro et al., 2023; Rasch et al., 2022). The predominant approach focusses on measuring the lateral clearance during the passing phase
(Beck et al., 2021; López et al., 2020; Louro et al., 2023; Rasch et al., 2022). Dozza et al. (2016) propose parameters for different phases of an overtaking manoeuvre in their study, e.g. the duration of and the distance within the approaching, steering-away, passing, and returning phases of an overtaking manoeuvre. More complex sensor data, e.g. 3D LiDAR point clouds, along with derived surrogate safety measures, allow new insights on each overtake. For analysing an overtaking manoeuvre in detail, appropriate visualizations of overtaking manoeuvres are supposed to help traffic analysts and researchers. Often, both an individual overtake as well as a summary of various overtakes on the same road section are of interest to the analyst. The question arises how these analyses can be effectively supported by spatiotemporal visualizations of overtaking manoeuvres. Dodge and Noi (2021) emphasise the efficiency of interactivity and animation for visualizing objects that change their attributes and their position in space and time. Therefore, this work proposes interactive spatiotemporal visualizations to a) examine the pattern of various overtaking manoeuvres taking place at the same site and b) to visually investigate individual overtaking manoeuvres, including their measured surrogate safety measures.
