Speeding behavior and speed limits for heterogeneous bicycle flow

Abstract

Objective: Speed limits for motorized vehicles are widely used to reduce noise and promote road safety. Unfortunately, there is little research on speed limits for bicycles, especially for electric bicycles. This article aims to analyze the speeding behavior and propose the suggested speed limit values for electric bicycles.

Methods: Field speed data were collected from 11 segments of separated bicycle lanes in Hangzhou, China. The speeding behavior of different types of bicycles was analyzed under different speed limits. Mixed logistic models are proposed to model speeding behavior and its influencing factors. Eighty-fifth percentile speeds under different conditions were calculated as speed limits. Stepwise regression models are proposed to model the relationships between the 85th percentile speeds and their influencing factors, and speed limits for different types of bicycles were determined.

Results: It is recommended that the speed limits for pure electric bicycle traffic be set as 25–30 km/h and 30–35 km/h for bicycle lanes with widths less than 3 m and greater than 3 m, respectively. The recommended speed limit for heterogeneous bicycle flows is 25 km/h.

Conclusions: The suggested speed limit values for different bicycle traffic flow can help to improve speed limit laws and policies for bicycle traffic.

Keywords:

• Speed limit
• electric bicycle
• 85th percentile speed
• logistic regression
• stepwise multiple regression

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the postgraduates of the institute of ITS at Zhejiang University for their assistance in field bicycle data collection. We also express our sincere thanks to the Editor-in-Chief, Associate Editor, and three anonymous reviewers whose comments significantly improved an earlier version of this work.

Disclosure statement

All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (No. LQ17E080001), the Ministry of Education of Humanities and Social Science Project (No. 19YJCZH200), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 91746105).