Designing effective vehicle-based countermeasures for vulnerable road users demands an understanding of the relationship between injury and injury source. The aim of this study was to explore this association for bicyclists in fatal real-life-crashes. All fatal crashes in Sweden where a bicyclist was killed when hit by the front of a passenger car between 2002 and 2008 were studied in detail using on-scene data. An analysis was performed to determine the body region containing the injury causing death, and the point of the car accountable for the fatal injury. These crashes were then compared to a previous study with the same selection criteria for vehicle-to-pedestrian fatal crashes.
A combined analysis revealed that the dominating injury mechanism was head/neck injury from the windshield area. The most frequent injurious windshield parts were structural; the frame and lower parts of the glass area with instrument panel situated within the head's line of motion. This study indicates that bicyclists' injury sources were located more rearwardly on the car (e.g. windshield relative to hood), in comparison to injury sources in fatal vehicle-to- pedestrian crashes.
If countermeasures to prevent fatal bicyclist injury in vehicle impacts were to be concentrated on mitigating head and thorax impact to the structural parts of the windshield, a dominant share of fatal bicyclist crashes could be prevented. This study shows that pedestrian countermeasures also have a potential for reducing injury in bicyclist crashes, but indicating that these countermeasures should be extended to address higher areas of the windshield.