Would you be willing to ride in a lab and let researchers tug on your handlebars?
Image: Accident Analysis & Prevention
You’ve probably had it happen to you. You’re riding along, not a care in the world, when suddenly your handlebars twitch, and in an instant you’re scrambling to keep yourself from hitting the deck.
Maybe you’ve hit something in the road, maybe another cyclist – or, heaven forbid, a motorist – has clipped your handlebars. However it happened, it’s a horrible feeling. Sometimes you manage to keep the bike upright; other times you aren’t so fortunate.
For any given incident, there are many variables that help decide whether you fall or not – how much your handlebars moved, how much force was involved, how fast you were riding, how quickly you reacted, and so on. And yet, what if there was a way to quantify whether, for a given incident, you’re likely to fall or not? Information like that could help us to understand cycling crashes a little better and, just maybe, help reduce the number of crashes in the future and make cycling a little bit safer overall.
That’s the goal of a new piece of research out of the Netherlands, more specifically from researchers out of Delft University of Technology and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. As per the title of their new paper, published in the journal Accident Analysis & Prevention, the researchers set out to create a mathematical model that would predict the “maximum allowable handlebar disturbance from which a cyclist can recover balance.”
The way they went about their research is quite fascinating (and more than a little anxiety-inducing).
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