How to make intersections safer for cyclists?

Several intersection facilities may enhance cycling safety. These are the most important ones:

• Median island. Median islands make crossing safer for cyclists, because they can cross in stages. This is most relevant at wide and busy distributor roads in the urban area [26].
• Bike box. Bike boxes at traffic lights allow cyclists to position themselves ahead of other traffic, so that they can turn left more safely and easily. They are more visible to motorised traffic since there are no blind spots. That is why bike boxes can prevent blind spot crashes [25] [27].
• Deflecting the bicycle track inwards or outwards. Just before or after an intersection, the bicycle track deflects from or towards the carriageway [25]. This enhances cyclists’ visibility to other traffic. For cyclists on urban distributor roads, the probability of crash on an intersection with an access road is lowest on roads with a one-way bicycle track that is at a distance of two to five meters to the carriageway [26] [27]. A larger distance actually results in a crash increase, although this increase is smaller than in the case of bicycle lanes. For intersections between two distributor roads, the effects of inwards and outwards deflection of the bicycle track and the optimal distance between intersection and bicycle track are unknown.
• Separate green phase for cyclists. Traffic lights at intersections with a separate green phase for cyclists  enhance road safety [18]. This implies that green lights for cyclists coincide with red lights for motor vehicles. Thus, no conflicts between these transport modes would occur if nobody ran a red light.

Which of the facilities above is chosen depends on the volume of passing traffic and on the presence of bicycle facilities on the connecting road sections.