Choosing safe and suitable bicycle routes to integrate cycling and public transport systems

Abstract

Bicycle utilization has become an important transportation mode in various cities during the past decade. It has brought a rapid growth as an important transport mode in many countries by providing several benefits for traffic, health and cost. However, the growing in bicycle utilization demand causes many problems such as safety, effectiveness etc. For this reason, other effective parameters on urban transport should be considered when planning new safe bicycle paths in the spatial platform. In this study, it was aimed to examine all these negative and positive effective parameters on safety and choice while integrating cycling with a public transport (bus link) system. To determine effective parameters on route choice, a Questionnaire Survey (QS) was carried out on 460 participants who are cycling for a long time in Isparta City/Turkey. It was obtained from the QS that Accident Prone Areas (APA) are the most important factor on cycling and public transport integration. The other parameters are determined as Bus Lane (BL), Road Side Car Park (RSCP), Bicycle Parks (BP), Road Grade (RG), Signalization (S), Traffic Capacity (TC), Connected Bike Lane (CBL) and Separated Bike Lane (SBL) according to their importance. In order to determine safer and serviceable bicycle routes selection problem, accident-prone locations (using Accident Reports and Geographic Information Systems-GIS), bus lines and survey data has been used in GIS. Also, a multi-criteria decision making approach Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method is implemented to analyze survey data and decide effective parameters on safer and serviceable bicycle routes. It was found that safer and serviceable bicycle routes can be determined by the utilization of QS, GIS and AHP methods with together. Also, it was concluded that Accident Prone Areas, Bus Lanes and Road Side Car Parks are the most important factors while integrating cycling with a public transport system.