Ask what the future of our road network looks like, and most answers focus on vehicles: connected cars, automated driving, adaptive signals, road user charging. Yet one group of road users is still largely invisible to the systems we use to manage our networks, and that’s people on bikes.

Policy at every level wants more people cycling. But traffic management still sees them only partially. Signal timings are optimised around vehicle detection, and anyone who cycles regularly knows the frustration of waiting at a junction that doesn’t register them. Safety analysis relies on recorded collisions, which arrive after harm is done and miss the near misses that never reach the statistics. Cycle counters tell us how many people passed a point, but not what happened to them along the way.

The data gap is closing

This is changing. Connected bike lights, GPS trackers, app-based data and video analytics can now show where cyclists brake hard, swerve, slow down or wait, and where surfaces are poor. Combined and anonymised, these sources give a network-wide view of the cycling experience that fixed counters alone can’t provide.

The bigger opportunity comes from combining this data with what authorities already hold. In Melbourne, an iMOVE research project brought together connected cycling data, connected vehicle data and SCATS signal data, integrating cycling into a multimodal traffic management framework. (See.Sense contributed the cycling dataset.) The analysis identified where junction delays, mid-block hazards and poor surfaces were affecting cyclists, giving planners evidence to adjust lanes, intersections and signal phasing. Clusters of harsh braking and swerving also turned out to be a useful early indicator of potential crash locations.

Why it matters for the UK now

Several issues on the UK agenda make this timely:

• Signal obsolescence. Many authorities face replacing ageing signal equipment. That’s a rare chance to design in better cyclist detection and data feeds from the start, rather than retrofitting later.
• Connected and automated vehicles. As automated vehicle trials expand beyond London, these vehicles will need to share space safely with cyclists. Understanding how cyclists actually behave at junctions and pinch points should inform how those deployments are planned and assessed.
• Proactive safety. Near-miss and behavioural data let authorities act on emerging risks rather than waiting for collisions to accumulate.
• Maintenance prioritisation. Cyclists feel surface defects first and most severely, so their data can help target limited maintenance budgets where risk is highest.

Practical next steps

For authorities and operators, a few practical steps would make a real difference:

• Include active travel data in ITS and traffic management strategies from the outset, not as a separate workstream.
• Specify cyclist detection and data integration in signal replacement programmes.
• Pilot multimodal data integration on a UK corridor, building on international evidence.
• Agree common data standards so cycling data can flow into existing UTC and analytics platforms.

The future road network will be more connected and more automated. Making sure it can see everyone using it, including people on bikes, is a choice we can make now.

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ITS UK’s Future Roads Forum takes place on 3 December in Edinburgh. Register here