Assessment of Latent Bicycle Demand in Street Networks

Due to numerous benefits of bicycling as a means of transportation, planning and policy efforts at all levels of governments aim to increase levels of bicycling. In order to decide where to best invest tax payer’s money in bicycle facilities, many cities and regional planning agencies base their decisions on bike counts at the present. However, in areas of poor bicycle infrastructure, this tends to lead to negative feedback loops in policy making and planning, as fewer bicycle counts also means less investment. This paper presents a new GIS- and network-based method that identifies on which network portions an improvement of bicycle facilities can create most additional bicycle demand. These network portions may also be segments of currently low bicycle use.