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An analysis of bicycle route choice preferences in Texas, US

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Abstract

In the US, the rise in motorized vehicle travel has contributed to serious societal, environmental, economic, and public health problems. These problems have increased the interest in encouraging non-motorized modes of travel (walking and bicycling). The current study contributes toward this objective by identifying and evaluating the importance of attributes influencing bicyclists’ route choice preferences. Specifically, the paper examines a comprehensive set of attributes that influence bicycle route choice, including: (1) bicyclists’ characteristics, (2) on-street parking, (3) bicycle facility type and amenities, (4) roadway physical characteristics, (5) roadway functional characteristics, and (6) roadway operational characteristics. The data used in the analysis is drawn from a web-based stated preference survey of Texas bicyclists. The results of the study emphasize the importance of a comprehensive evaluation of both route-related attributes and bicyclists’ demographics in bicycle route choice decisions. The empirical results indicate that travel time (for commuters) and motorized traffic volume are the most important attributes in bicycle route choice. Other route attributes with a high impact include number of stop signs, red light, and cross-streets, speed limits, on-street parking characteristics, and whether there exists a continuous bicycle facility on the route.

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Notes

  1. The use of a web-based survey will not provide a representative sample of the population at large. Indeed, coverage bias is the primary limitation of web-based surveys resulting from some population segments not having access to or not informed about the use of the internet (TCRP 2006). One possible solution to overcome this limitation is to implement a multi-method survey combining a variety of survey methods. But such a survey, in addition to its high-cost characteristics, can result in significant measurement error (i.e., the same question can be answered differently because of the different survey methods; see Dillman (2000) and TCRP (2006) for a detailed discussion of this point). On the other hand, a web-based survey is a low-cost approach that is effective when targeting bicyclists, who tend to be quite well educated. Also, the focus of our effort here is on obtaining information from individuals who have had some experience in bicycling, since the objective is to obtain useful information for an objective assessment of bicycle facilities and an analysis of bicycling concerns/reasons. Further, given the focus on bicyclists, the route choice model estimates are valid even though we do not have a representative sample of bicylists. This is due to Manski and Lerman’s (1981) result for exogenous samples, which is applicable here because the alternatives in the route choice analysis are unlabelled alternatives constructed by the analyst. In this sense, we do not have a choice-based sample because respondents are not chosen based on their route choice.

  2. The rotation and overlapping design generates combination sets of four attributes from the full set of attributes minus the parking type attribute that is always considered. For each respondent, one of the quadruplet set of attributes is chosen and used in all SP questions posed for that person. The goal of the rotation and overlapping design scheme is to present each combination set about the same number of times across all respondents so that the impact of each attribute (as well as interaction effects of attributes) can be efficiently captured in estimation. To achieve this, a java based software code is written that randomly assigns one of the four attribute sets to the respondent.

  3. The split between females and males in our sample (national sample) is 71 to 29% (62 to 38%). The percentage of individuals in the 18–24 years range in our sample is 11%, while the percentage in the 16–24 years range in the national sample is 24% (the age groups used are different between the two samples, and so a perfect comparison is not possible).

  4. Strictly speaking, these trade-offs with respect to time (and money) are a function of age and gender too, but we aggregate over age and gender for the trade-off computations in Table 4 by assuming the age split and gender split as obtained in our sample.

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Acknowledgments

The research in this paper was funded by a Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT) project entitled “Operational and Safety Impacts for Bicyclists Using Roadways with On-Street Parking”. The authors would like to thank the project monitoring committee of TxDOT Project 0-5755 for their input and suggestions during the course of the TxDOT project. Four reviewers and Editor-in-Chief, Martin Richards, provided valuable feedback on an earlier version of the paper. Lisa Macias helped with formatting and typesetting the document. Finally, the first author would like to dedicate her part of the research efforts to her beloved grandmother, Nese Nihal Ozsoy, who passed away in October 2008.

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  1. Department of Civil, Architectural & Environmental Engineering, The University of Texas at Austin, 1 University Station, C1761, Austin, TX, 78712-0278, USA

    Ipek N. Sener, Naveen Eluru & Chandra R. Bhat

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  1. Ipek N. Sener
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Correspondence to Chandra R. Bhat.

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Sener, I.N., Eluru, N. & Bhat, C.R. An analysis of bicycle route choice preferences in Texas, US. Transportation 36, 511–539 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-009-9201-4

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