Abstract

Usually a bicycle accident is meant to be a collision with the front of a car against the side of an crossing bicycle. Consequently, most reconstruction methods are based on this. If the collision happens the other way round – the bicycle drives head-on into an crossing car – far fewer reconstruction approaches are available. In this research report this impulse shall be investigated systematically.

For this purpose, the kinematics of the accident must be determined and characteristic patterns of the marks on the side surface of the vehicle need to be identified. Based on these findings a potential correlation between the identified marks – especially the distances of the individual trace fields – and the boundary conditions of the collision can be analyzed. The bicycle’s wheel diameter, the collision’s angle, the friction between bicycle tyre and road surface and the vehicle’s speed (vKfz) in particular were determined to be keys parameters. The influence of other parameters is significantly smaller and thus not suitable for describing systematic correlations. The objective is to determine a methodology for incident reconstruction based on the patterns of the marks.

For this purpose, 24 simulations were created to systematically determine the influence of the aforementioned variables. Additionally, eleven crash tests were conducted where the parameter variation was limited to the relevant variable vKfz. To evaluate the results plots were created and correlation coefficients calculated.

The analysis shows a correlation between vKfz and the distances between the marks. The behavior of the mark lengths was not analyzed in depth – although it can be stated that for some of them a systematology can be observed.