Parallel Session 8.2- “Decision Support Systems ” 697 Decision Support for Bicycle Route Planning In Urban Environments

Over the last years, electronic route planners have become a common decision support tool especially for car drivers. Through the ongoing development of Location Based Service (LBS), electronic route planners are expected to be more frequently used by cyclists and pedestrians in the near future, too. For a user friendly design of route planners, the number of route selection criteria among which the user can choose is one of the key aspects. This paper describes and analyses observed route choice behavior of cyclists in urban environments and assesses the number of criteria the navigator considers for selecting the best route. In a desktop experiment, the testing subjects stated their preferred route among four given route suggestions on a paper map. The stated preferences were compared to the ranking found by self explicated preference analysis. The results show that the decision behavior of most users can be explained through a compensatory decision rule. We conclude that the user interface of a route planning support tool should provide the functionality to allow a navigator for stating his preferences for several route selection criteria, and not only for one single criterion