Observational Study of Buffered Bike Lane Design Implementation of Roadway Bicycling in Portland, Oregon

Graduation date: 2017Bicyclists are one of the highest and most vulnerable road users. This is due to the higher likelihood of being seriously injured when involved in a crash. This research seeks to understand two different behavioral interactions of an implemented facility user: the motorist (secondary user) and bicyclist (primary user). The resulting model is for road segments only and does not include intersections. For the bicyclists behavior this research attempts to understand the use of available buffered bicycle lane; a bicyclists’ sway (or side to side movement) within a buffered bicycle lane; the passing of another bicyclist; and the behavior of vehicles adjacent to the travel lanes under different operating conditions of traffic densities, speeds, and facility design. For the motorist behavior, the research is seeks to understand the motorist and bicyclist behavior during a high-risk vehicle/bicyclist conflict point to define near miss collisions. The data that is to be evaluated by an ANOVA are the non-truncated and truncated data sets for each buffered bicycle lane facility. A binary logistic regression (logit) model was used to evaluate the behavior of near miss collisions between a bicyclist and motorized vehicles