Understand e-bicyclist safety in China: Crash severity modeling using a generalized ordered logit model

A thorough crash modeling effort was made to examine e-bicyclists' injury severity, using a generalized ordered logit model, which can capture the ordinal nature of injury severity and allow for heterogeneity across observations. A number of factors associated with injury severity of e-bicyclists are identified, including older e-bicyclists, heavy truck involved, e-bicyclist at fault, e-bicyclist turn left, e-bicyclist cross the road, driver turn right, industrial area, weekday, and tree separation. Safety countermeasures and interventions are thus proposed based on the modeling results, including developing educational programs for specific age groups (e.g. older e-bicyclists, female e-bicyclists, and inexperienced drivers), launching safety campaigns, improving geometric design and traffic control in low-developed area, curve roads, and signalized intersections. Moreover, some interesting research topics are also suggested, such as examining head-on e-bike crash mechanism, crash mechanism between e-bicyclists and heavy trucks and motorcycles, and safety effects of different separation treatments on e-bicyclists' injury severity from kinetic and kinematic perspectives.