Cycling Research Board Annual Meeting

Cycling is widely promoted as a sustainable and healthy mode of transport, but safety concerns remain a barrier to wider uptake. As cities continue to invest in cycling infrastructure, there is a need for methods that capture how cyclists interact with and respond to these environments under real-world conditions. Existing approaches to cyclist safety assessment, including crash statistics, surveys, and traffic conflict analysis, offer useful perspectives but often lack continuous, fine-grained measurements of cyclist behaviour and responses during everyday riding. Commercial cycling computers and fitness-oriented devices, by contrast, are primarily designed for performance tracking and navigation and offer limited support for capturing safety-related interactions with the road environment.
This work presents CREDA (Cyclist and Road Environment Data Analytics), a bicycle-mounted multimodal sensing platform for collecting detailed data on cyclists’ interactions with the road environment. The system combines bicycle-mounted sensors for measuring proximity, inertial measurement, GPS-based positioning, environmental conditions, and physiological responses, together with first-person video recordings. These synchronized data streams support event-level analysis of cyclists’ interactions with traffic, infrastructure, and surrounding environmental conditions, enabling the detection and analysis of safety-critical events during naturalistic cycling trips. By relating behavioural, environmental, and physiological measurements to specific road locations, CREDA aims to examine how different road environments shape cyclists’ experiences and to support improved methods for evaluating cycling infrastructure and informing safer road design.