On the Reliability of VANET Safety Applications for Bicycles

In the context of connected vehicles, the focus of safety applications has mainly been on accident avoidance of motor vehicles, and little attention has been given to bicycle safety. This research presents a bicycle safety application for connected vehicles. The safety application aims to reduce the so-called right hook conflict, a common accident scenario where a right-turning vehicle causes a crash with an adjacent bicycle. The information exchanged during normal beacon messages of vehicles is used by the application to alert drivers of potential collisions with bicycles, without introducing addition message overhead or deviating from current standards. The proposed safety application was implemented using commercial equipment, installed in the vehicle and bicycle, and the effectiveness was evaluated based on real-world field experiments.