Overtaking by motorized vehicles with insufficient lateral passing distance (LPD) from cyclists can lead to near misses, causing cyclists to feel stressed. This highlights the need to consider both objective safety conditions and subjective safety perceptions.
We conducted a semi-naturalistic field study in urban mixed traffic where N = 38 participants cycled along two predefined routes in the city of Braunschweig, Germany, with an instrumented bicycle. For each overtaking event we measured the maintained LPD with an ultrasonic Sensor and recorded cyclists’ verbal rating of their Mental Comfort. We also captured different characteristics of each event (e.g. cycling facility, speed limit, type of overtaking vehicle etc.).
For N = 720 overtaking events with a mean LPD of M = 161.0 cm (SD = 44.8 cm) 42.5 % of the events were below the legal required minimum LPD of 150 cm. There are no significant differences in the mean LPD between different cycling facilities. However, it can be observed that the number of close overtaking events is lowest when cycling facilities are provided with the highest mean LPD on mandatory cycle lanes.
Measuring cyclists’ perceptions show that in most situations (68.7 %) Mental Comfort is at least rather good, so that they feel relatively stress-free, relaxed and safe. Depending on the LPD, cyclists’ Mental Comfort is quite poor for close overtaking. So, the initial results show first indications that LPD is a crucial parameter for cyclists’ Mental Comfort.