Reaction model of conflictive e-bikes and numerical simulation

The tremendous growing ownership of electric bikes (e-bikes) brings serious traffic safety problems. Existing models aim to describe the conflict between pairwise traffic participants, which may not be appropriate for analyzing traffic conflicts among multiple e-bikes. This study aimed to model the trajectory changes for e-bikes in conflict scenarios, and simulate the e-bike movements during conflicts. First, the conflict zone of e-bike is represented as an isosceles triangle, within which the e-bikes would either adapt a lateral (right or left) shift in its trajectory or slow down to avoid potential collisions. Second, the kinematic principles of the classical optimal velocity model were employed to solve the overlapping problem of the cyclist reactions to the multiple conflictive e-bikes. Finally, the model was calibrated with trajectory data collected from video surveillance, and two types of numerical simulations were carried out. The experiment results verified the model performance of simulating the conflictive e-bike trajectories with multiple e-bike involved conflicts. It is also found that the unique typical phenomena of e-bikes such as the diagonal spatial distributions can be reproduced. It is hoped that the findings of this study may be helpful in modeling and simulation study of e-bike flow.