Bicycle hazards : Do intersections matter?

The Swedish city of Umeå is one amongst other cities that has a focus on the increase in the bicycling usage. The municipality of Umeå aims to make public transport, bicycling and walking the most frequently used modes of transport in the city (Umeå kommun, 2017b). There are both positive and negative effects when people are using the bicycle as a mode of transportation. The positive aspects can be increase in health benefits, more environmentally friendly than other transport options and it is a relatively cheap way to transport oneself. The negative aspects can be that more people get hurt due to the risks with bicycling such as physical infrastructure related hazards. The aim of this thesis is to explore if the number of roads in an intersection has any correlation with the amount and severity of accidents and to analyse it in the scope of sustainable development and accessibility. This was done with the quantitative database STRADA which consists of both hospital data and police data on bicycles accidents in the timespan of 2008-2018. The chosen study area was Umeå but with two more specific locations: the city centre and the campus area. Two different approaches were used to utilize the data from STRADA: GIS to create descriptive maps and calculations of the bicycle accidents and logistics-regressions to investigate the accident severity relation to a certain number of chosen variables. The main findings were that it is important that every aspect of bicycling should be as safe as possible otherwise many beneficial effects with bicycling may disappear, such as the ones with sustainable development and accessibility. The results show that there was one type of intersection that had relevance and that was the intersections with three roads in it. Three road intersections were significant in two ways. The first way was that it caused an increased risk in more severe accidents and the second way had an opposite relationship and this was depending on what type of geographical place one was looking at. As with other risk factors there were many variables that affected the outcome of the risk. In Umeå it seemed that people that were over age 39, accidents with vehicles and winter were factors alongside with the three road intersections