Rethinking cycling safety: The role of gender in cyclist crash injury severity outcomes

Given the ongoing climate crisis and the need for environmentally friendly communities, there has been an increasing interest in sustainable mobility solutions such as cycling. This study seeks to incorporate an equitable component to studying cycling safety and uses one full year's data of 4,457 single bicycle-single motor vehicle crashes that took place in 2022 in the state of Florida to estimate a series of random parameters multinomial logit models with heterogeneity in the means and variances to capture gender differences in outcome severities. A comparison of advanced statistical models such as unconstrained and partially constrained approaches, that were previously employed in the literature to test for temporal stability, is undertaken in a new application. A partially constrained model is estimated to best identify gender specific factors and argue the need to evaluate and promote safety of female and male cyclists separately. The study finds substantial differences between how the contributing factors and crash circumstances impact the crash injury severity of women and men cyclists. It evaluates factors such as age, location, cyclist behavior, weather, and road design as well as performs out-of-sample simulation to gain additional insights. The findings of this research emphasize the need for targeted approaches in designing our cities and policy making that account for the collective differences in behavior and experience of women and men cyclists.