Invited Paper: Safety Assistance Systems for Bicyclists: Toward Empirical Studies of the Dooring Problem

To reach the goal of zero traffic fatalities a year, one building block is the proposition to develop advanced assistance systems for vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as bicyclists. We focus on the dooring problem, i.e., car doors being opened inattentively in the way of an approaching cyclist. We extended our vehicle to everything (V2X) communication-enabled virtual cycling environment for dooring experiments. Our system extends toolkits that are widely used in the V2X research community. We showcase how such a system may be used to realize and evaluate distributed algorithms for VRU safety solutions such as dooring prevention.