Evaluating the Bicycle Travel Environment in a Changing Bicycle Culture: Case Study of Shanghai, China
Publication: Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 143, Issue 3
Abstract
The recent revival of bicycle research has generated studies mainly from North America, while evidence from other regions with complete bikeway networks is needed to identify the impact of various aspects of a bicycle network. China has a long-established bicycle culture, but has been losing bicycle travel shares to other transport modes in cities. Using Shanghai as a case study, this paper aims to understand Chinese cycle users’ current preferences regarding environmental factors and their implications for the evaluation and planning of the local bikeway network. Stated choice experiment enhanced by visualizing the choice scenarios is used to collect cycle users’ bicycle route preferences through Internet and on-site questionnaire surveys. A generalized mixed logit model with a new form of utility function, taking into account the interaction between segment-level factors and travel time, is used to fit the choice data. It is found that the segment-level factors are more important than the route-level factors, and the safety-related factors are more important than the comfort-related factors; the marginal utility increases between the consecutive factor levels follow a diminishing trend. The model is applied to evaluate the bicycle travel environment of the complete road network of Shanghai central city. The analysis of the measures for improving the bikeway network according to different levels of priority suggests that guaranteeing cycle users’ road rights is the central issue for promoting bicycle travel in the city.
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Acknowledgments
The project is funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 51108323), The 2013 Elite Program of Tongji University (No. 0100219141), and Shanghai Tongji Institute of Urban Planning Design and Research (KY-2013-E02). The authors would like to thank Bowen Tian, Yaqi Pi, Hui Bai, Yan Cai, and other students who produced the graphs, and Haixiong Li, Yite He, and Yang Zhao, who administered the surveys.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Urban Planning and Development
Volume 143 • Issue 3 • September 2017
Copyright
©2017 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Apr 4, 2016
Accepted: Oct 11, 2016
Published online: Jan 23, 2017
Discussion open until: Jun 23, 2017
Published in print: Sep 1, 2017
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