Identifying urban features for vulnerable road user safety in Europe
DOI: 10.1140/epjds/s13688-022-00339-5
archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified
Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)
Summary
This study addresses the urgent need to reduce road traffic casualties, particularly among vulnerable road users (pedestrians, cyclists, and motorcyclists), in alignment with UN Sustainable Development Goals and the Vision Zero initiative. While previous research often focused on single transport modes or limited geographical areas, this paper identifies urban features that determine safety across multiple European cities by analyzing inter-mode collision data. The authors aim to understand which urban characteristics and mobility policies most effectively reduce injuries and fatalities. The researchers constructed a dataset of road crashes from 24 cities across five European countries (Spain, Italy, France, the UK, and Norway) for the year 2018. They utilized the "killed or seriously injured" (KSI) indicator as the primary safety metric, creating casualty matrices to quantify injuries resulting from collisions between different road user types. To identify determinants of safety, the authors extracted seven urban features from OpenStreetMap and the European Platform on Mobility Management, including population density, modal shares for walking, cycling, public transport, and motor vehicles, and infrastructure metrics such as the proportion of protected cycling paths and low-speed limited roads. Climate and economic data from Eurostat were included to control for confounding factors. Multiple linear regression models were applied to analyze the relationship between these urban features and inter-mode KSI rates, selecting the best models based on the Akaike Information Criterion. The results revealed significant heterogeneity in road safety across the studied cities, with British cities generally exhibiting higher KSI rates than French, Spanish, or Norwegian cities. The analysis identified walking modal share as the most significant predictor of reduced casualties. Cities with higher shares of walking demonstrated statistically significant lower KSI rates for pedestrians, cyclists, and car occupants involved in collisions with cars. Protected cycling infrastructure was also significantly associated with lower pedestrian casualties. Conversely, while a higher proportion of low-speed limited roads significantly reduced injuries for car occupants in single-vehicle crashes, it showed no detectable relation to pedestrian or cyclist safety. Average temperature emerged as a significant predictor for powered two-wheeler casualties, likely serving as a proxy for their modal share. The study concludes that policies promoting walking and cycling are the most effective strategies for improving road safety for all users, including drivers. The findings support a shift from car-centric to people-centric urban planning, suggesting that reallocating road space to sustainable modes reduces overall collision risks. The authors recommend that European cities adopt concrete targets for increasing walking and cycling modal shares, potentially through infrastructure extensions and pedestrianization, to achieve safer and more sustainable urban environments.
Key finding
Cities with higher modal shares for walking and cycling exhibit significantly lower rates of killed or seriously injured individuals among vulnerable road users compared to cities with lower shares.
Methodology
modeling
Sample size: 24
Provenance
The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed. Discovered via topic_sweep_doaj on 2026-06-01.
| Stage | Outcome | Tool | Model | Prompt | Attempts | Completed |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| discover | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| archive | success | canonical_url | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-06 |
| extract | success | cached | — | — | 3 | 2026-06-10 |
| clean | success | clean | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| chunk | success | chunk | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| embed | success | embed | Qwen/Qwen3-Embedding-8B | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| enrich | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-01 |
| promote | success | — | — | — | 1 | 2026-06-04 |
| summarize | success | llm | qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant | summ-v5 | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
| tag | success | vector_similarity | — | — | 15 | 2026-06-11 |
| verify | success | — | — | — | 2 | 2026-06-10 |
Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-10; verification: verified.
Topics
Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.
Information type
What kind of knowledge this paper contributes, grouped by family — independent of topic (what it is about) and method (how it was studied).
- Empirical Findings: crash risk outcomes