01697856

Component

Harsh winters experienced in North American present a formidable barrier to promoting sustained year-round bicycle ridership. To mitigate this, many cities and agencies are implementing a growing number of creative methods to increase bicycle ridership, such as educational campaigns, year-round bike-shares, innovative infrastructure and facilities, and economic policies. However, quantitatively measuring the impact of these efforts is difficult without normalizing the "seasonality'' of bicycle ridership. The lack of such quantitative measures is often an obstacle for efforts geared towards increasing bicycle ridership, making justification for such efforts difficult. This paper proposes a framework for measuring seasonality with a model for demand using parametric sinusoidal function to provide a normalized seasonality factor for demand, called alpha. This model is fitted through least-squares optimization, enabling the interpolation of missing data points (e.g. winter closure of bike-share stations). The proposed model and framework is applied to the Bluebike bike-share system in Boston, Cambridge, Brookline, and Somerville, Massachusetts, analyzing a variety of factors as infrastructure, land use, demographics, and employment statistics. The outcome of this research is a basic framework that can be used for analyzing bicycle seasonality to provide insights for planning, engineering, and decision-making.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF20 Standing Committee on Bicycle Transportation.

19-05064

English

11p

2019

Transportation Research Board 98th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; Maps; References; Tables

Bicycle travel; Cyclists; Outreach; Seasons; Weather conditions

Boston Metropolitan Area

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Safety and Human Factors

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2019 Paper #19-05064

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Dec 7 2018 9:40AM