Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Cycling Past 50: A Closer Look Into The World Of Older Cyclists, Year 4 Survey, Carol Kachadoorian

Mineta Transportation Institute

This document reports on approximately 5,000 responses to a North American survey of older adults who cycle. The survey, open from August 2021 through March 2022, included questions that captured a person’s cycling over their life course, as well as their current cycling styles, habits, and preferences. Responses reflect the impact of various factors on an older adult’s cycling habits with respect to their ability and agility and their expectation to continue cycling. The survey asked about falls and near misses in the past-year coding fall descriptions into six categories and sorting them by the respondent’s gender and age. The …

A Bike System For All In Silicon Valley: Equity Assessment Of Bike Infrastructure In San José, Ca, Ahoura Zandiatashbar, Jochen Albrecht, Hilary Nixon

Mineta Transportation Institute

Investing in sustainable, multimodal infrastructure is of increasing importance throughout the United States and worldwide. Cities are increasingly making strategic capital investment decisions about bicycle infrastructure—decisions that need planning efforts that accurately assess the equity aspects of developments, achieve equitable distribution of infrastructures, and draw upon accurate assessment methods. Toward these efforts, this project uses a granular bike network dataset with statistical and geospatial analyses to quantify a bike infrastructure availability score (i.e., bike score) that accounts for the safety and comfort differences in bike path classes in San José, California. San José is the 10th largest U.S. city and …

Ccrpc Bicycle Count Data Analysis And Count Program Design Strategies, Gregory Rowangould, Eliana Fox, Rose O'Brien, Julia Clarke

University of Vermont Transportation Research Center

In 2017, the Chittenden County Regional Planning Commission (CCRPC) completed the most recent update of the region’s Active Transportation Plan (ATP) with the goal of creating “a safe, comfortable, and connected regional network of pedestrian and bicycle routes that appeal to all ages and abilities”. Developing a “robust” bicycle count program was one of the key non-infrastructure recommendations in the ATP (CCRPC, 2017). The UVM Transportation Research Center (“TRC”) was contracted to evaluate current bicycle data collection efforts in the region, identify gaps and limitations and make recommendations on how to develop a comprehensive bicycle count program that could better …

Westwood Multimodal Transportation Plan, Ashley N. Austin

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

Westwood is experiencing an industrial regeneration that will change the way the area is utilized by the surrounding communities. To be proactive, Henrico County is planning for the future by creating an overlay zoning district and striving for a multimodal environment to ensure the area grows in a sustainable manner.

This plan evaluates the study area, retrieves community engagement, and makes recommendations on streetscape design and public transit improvements to create a multimodal Westwood. Study area observations provided evidence that the streets in Westwood need to be redesigned to accommodate more for pedestrians and cyclists. Community outreach in the form …

The Eastern Goochland Greenway: Connecting Goochland's Past, Present, And Future, Scott A. Newhart

Master of Urban and Regional Planning Capstone Projects

The Eastern Goochland Greenway Plan proposes a shared-use trail that is nested within the Virginia Department of Conservation and Recreation’s (DCR) conceptualization of a statewide trail system called the James River Heritage Trail (JRHT). The JRHT includes shared use bicycle and pedestrian facilities as well as water trail access points that would connect pre-existing trail systems to new proposed trails that are parallel with and in close proximity to Virginia’s James River corridor and all of the natural, cultural, and historic resource opportunities that the surrounding areas offer. Specifically, the Eastern Goochland Greenway aims to serve two major purposes; to …

"Integrated Science 3002a: Big Bike Giveaway: Changing London's Environment, Health, And Economy One Bike At A Time", Jermiah Joseph, Katelyn Melo, Devanshi Shukla, Tony Nguyen, Katherine Teeter

Community Engaged Learning Final Projects

There are significant benefits that manifest when an individual chooses to ride a bicycle as their primary mode of transportation. To investigate these benefits, the environmental, health, economic, and social impacts of biking were evaluated through research and data analyses. This revealed that numerous advantages can be obtained at an individual and local scale through citizens choosing to adopt a biking lifestyle. However, it was found that many Londoners are deterred from biking due to poor biking infrastructure. This paper calls into question the current cycling framework in London and it’s limitations on achieving the numerous benefits that biking offers. …

Female Cyclists: Two Essays From The 1869 Hancock Jeffersonian, Paige Zenovic

Nineteenth-Century Ohio Literature

Paige Zenovic introduces and explains two nineteenth-century essays from the Findley, Ohio Hancock Jeffersonian on the subject of women riding bicycles from the time when they were first being introduced to Ohio.

Massachusetts Urban Bicycle Preparedness, Rick L. Sheiber

Instructional Design Capstones Collection

Since 2007, Boston has made tremendous strides in shedding its designation by Bicycling Magazine as one of the “Worst Biking Cities” (Zezima, 2009, p. A12) by designating over 92 miles of bike lanes throughout the city and introducing bicycle initiatives like Boston Bikes, the Hubway bicycle sharing program. These efforts have resulted in a dramatic rise in the number of cyclists in Greater Boston and a decrease in accidents involving bicycles ((Pedroso, Angriman, Bellows & Taylor, 2016). While the quantitative research has been primarily positive, a 2017 survey initiated LivableStreets and the Longwood Area Cyclists of commuters in the Longwood …

Improving Livability Using Green And Active Modes: A Traffic Stress Level Analysis Of Transit, Bicycle, And Pedestrian Access And Mobility, Maaza C. Mekuria, Bruce Appleyard, Hilary Nixon

Mineta Transportation Institute

Understanding the relative attractiveness of alternatives to driving is vitally important toward lowering driving rates and, by extension, vehicle miles traveled (VMT), traffic congestion, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, etc. The relative effectiveness of automobile alternatives (i.e., buses, bicycling, and walking) depends on how well streets are designed to work for these respective modes in terms of safety, comfort and cost, which can sometimes pit their relative effectiveness against each other. In this report, the level of traffic stress (LTS) criteria previously developed by two of the authors was used to determine how the streets functioned for these auto alternative modes. …

Bikesharing And Bicycle Safety, Elliot Martin, Adam Cohen, Jan L. Botha, Susan Shaheen

Mineta Transportation Institute

The growth of bikesharing in the United States has had a transformative impact on urban transportation. Major cities have established large bikesharing systems, including Boston, Chicago, Denver, Minneapolis-Saint Paul, New York City, Salt Lake City, the San Francisco Bay Area, Seattle, Washington DC, and others. These systems began operating as early as 2010, and no fatalities have occurred within the US as of this writing. However, three have happened in North America—two in Canada and one in Mexico. Bikesharing has some qualities that appear inherently unsafe for bicyclists. Most prominently, helmet usage is documented to be quite low in most …

Ridazz, Wrenches, And Wonks: A Revolution On Two Wheels Rolls Into Los Angeles, Donald Parker Strauss

Antioch University Dissertations & Theses

How can we make cities more livable? Los Angeles, in particular, is a notably challenging place to live. For many, it is hard to see Los Angeles—city or county—as anything other than a huge, sprawling, and some would say placeless place. Los Angeles is known by many as the place that tore up more than 1,000 miles of streetcar lines to make way for millions of cars and hundreds of miles of freeways. Because of this, Los Angeles is also known for its poor air quality and jammed freeways. Those who live in Los Angeles know that it can be …

Perceptions Of Bicycle-Friendly Policy Impacts On Accessibility To Transit Services: The First And Last Mile Bridge, Mti Report 12-10, Bradley Flamm, Charles Rivasplata

Mineta Transportation Institute

The coordination of bicycle and transit modes has received close attention from public transit planners and researchers in recent years, as transit agencies around the world have installed bicycle racks on transit vehicles, implemented bicycles-on-trains policies, and made other efforts to facilitate bicycle-transit integration. Many planners presume that the catchment area for transit is enlarged by these efforts, but geographic changes in the size of catchment areas have not been effectively documented. This research project was designed to assess the distances travelled on bicycle by cycle-transit users (CTUs), both those who use bicycles as a means of access to transit …

Relating Bike Racks And Bike Ridership, John Sens

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

Abstract The purpose of this thesis was to investigate the relationship between bicycle ridership and bike racks in a given area. The goal was to discern whether or not the density of bike racks determines the number of riders in the area. I predicted that there would be higher ridership in the areas with a denser bike rack concentration. To investigate this point, I set up five different areas of varying sizes with a similar number of bike racks, and then observed them over a period of 5 business days. By using a simple tally of the bikes found on …

Using Bicycles For The First And Last Mile Of A Commute, Mineta Transportation Institute

Mineta Transportation Institute

Bicycle ridership as a partial or total workday method of commute is increasing in popularity. With that increase in cyclists comes challenges for transportation agencies: how can the needs of cyclists fit seamlessly with the needs of non-cyclists, especially those utilizing light rail and commuter rail such as Caltrain On June 3, 2009, MTI, the Commonwealth Club of California and the United States Department of Transportation sponsored "Using Bicycles for the First and Last Mile of a Commute" in San Jose Co-sponsors of the event included Caltrain, Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition, Silicon Valley Leadership …

The Fall 2008 Unl Bike Survey: Examining The Status Of Bicycle Transportation At The Univeristy Of Nebraska-Lincoln, Brent Schmoker

Department of Environmental Studies: Undergraduate Student Theses

This study evaluates the state of bicycle use by University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) students during the fall semester of 2008. An online survey was administered to a random sample of graduate and undergraduate students to determine the factors that encourage and inhibit students from using bikes for transportation to campus. The results suggest that a significant portion of the student population uses bikes for transportation to campus but several factors combine to keep the overall number of bicycle commuters low. The paper concludes with suggestions for increasing bike commuting to UNL and predictions about the future of transportation in the …

Riding The Wheel: Selling American Women Mobility And Geographic Knowledge, Christina E. Dando

Geography and Geology Faculty Publications

The bicycle's “prime” was a mere decade, 1890-1900, but in this brief window, it had a profound impact on American women’s lives. This paper will examine the role of the media in transforming women's relationship to their world, altering how, where and why they moved through the landscape, drawing from work on cartographic culture, actor-network theory and consumption and mass culture. Through popular magazine articles, stories, advertisements, and maps, American women (as well as men) were “informed” of the possibilities the bicycle had to offer, modeling geographic mobility, greater spatial awareness, and the practice of both cartography and landscape. Women …

Statewide Safety Study Of Bicycles And Pedestrians On Freeways, Expressway, Toll Bridges, And Tunnels, Thomas C. Ferrara

Mineta Transportation Institute

The purpose of this study is to attempt to clarify some of the issues pertaining to bicycles on freeways. Specifically, the goal of this project is to “develop policy recommendations, guidelines, and policies for bicycle and pedestrian use of freeways, expressways, tunnels, and toll bridges in California.”