BIKESAFE: Bicycle Countermeasure Selection System
Source: Federal Highway Administration (FHWA)
The system allows the user to refine his or her selection of treatments on the basis of site characteristics, such as geometric features and operating conditions, and the type of safety problem or desired behavioral change. The purpose of the system is to provide the most applicable information for identifying safety and mobility needs and improving conditions for bicyclists within the public right-of-way. BIKESAFE is intended primarily for engineers, planners, safety professionals, and decisionmakers, but it may also be used by citizens for identifying problems and recommending solutions for their communities.
BIKESAFE was designed to enable practitioners to select engineering, education, or enforcement treatments to help mitigate a known crash problem and/or to help achieve a specific performance objective. While the majority of the specific treatments are engineering countermeasures, many of the case studies include supplemental enforcement activities (e.g., a course that teaches police about enforcing bicycle safety) and/or educational approaches (e.g., educating people about riding on shared roadways or on roads with bicycle facilities). BIKESAFE uses known characteristics of the environment and permits the user to either view all countermeasures associated with a given objective or crash type or to view only those that are applicable to a defined set (as input by the user) of geometric and operating conditions. The objectives of the product are as follows:
- Provide information about bicycle crash types, statistics and other background resources.
- Provide user with information on what countermeasures are available to prevent specific categories of - bicycle crashes or to achieve certain performance objectives.
- Outline considerations to be addressed in the selection of a countermeasure.
- Provide a decision process to eliminate countermeasures from the list of possibilities.
- Provide case studies of countermeasures introduced in communities throughout the United States. BIKESAFE is an expert system that allows the user to select appropriate countermeasures or treatments to address specific problems. BIKESAFE also includes a large number of case studies to illustrate treatments implemented in communities throughout the United States.
