All efforts made until now regarding pedestrian friendly car design focused on the vehicle front. For bicyclists it will be the same. All passive and active measures are designed to handle the impact of a pedestrian or a bicyclist with the vehicle front which may include the wing area also. Accident research proves this approach:​ It is correct to cover these areas first and with the most effort. But there are certain accident patterns which need attention, too. And furthermore, there are already technical measures available which could address these accident patterns.

For this study, the in-depth database of the German Insurers (UDB) was used. It contains a representative cross section of all third party insurance claims reported between 2002 and 2012. The analyzed datapool contains n=416 bicyclist-car accidents and n=390 pedestrian-car accidents. Data shows the need to address the front impact for bicyclists (59%) and pedestrians (59%) as it is done nowadays. But there are other noticeable problems like the rear impact, for example. 17% (n=63) of the car-pedestrian accidents were rear impacts where the car was reversing slowly. In 63% of these cases the pedestrians were 69 years or older. Almost half of the involved pedestrians suffered MAIS3+ injuries that were all caused by the impact with the ground. It was also interesting that one third of the pedestrians that were hit by the rear end of the car were not moving as the impact occurred. Another example is the side impact for bicyclists. In 37% (n=139) of all bicyclist-car accidents the impact occurred on the side of the car, only 4% (n=15) were rear impacts. Noticeable is that in 18% of the cases the bicyclist got hit by the door of the car during door opening.

The paper will analyse these patterns more in detail and will discuss technical ways to avoid accidents like these. Further on full-scale-tests regarding door opening were conducted to get a better understanding of kinematics and loads. So it could be shown that the door opening angle has an important influence on the kinematics of the bicyclist.

With “Vision Zero” in mind all road safety potentials have to raise especially these where technical “ingredients” are already on the market. Finally it is up to manufacturers, legislation or consumer test organizations to identify safety related shortcomings and come up or ask for suitable countermeasures.