Cycle City : Investigating why UBC bikes

Vancouver has seen a surge in bicycle ridership under the Vision Vancouver Party-led municipal government over the past decade. Working towards the ideas of sustainability and livability in our urban environment, Vancouver has approved multiple cycling infrastructure projects throughout the city. These projects, however, have often met criticism from the communities they were intended to serve. Recent examples including the Kitsilano Beach Park bike path (in development since 2013), where a February 2018 proposal to pave over green space is being met with fierce opposition from community members, who disapprove of the proposed location of the path, highlight the need for more community involvement throughout the process of adding to the city’s cycling infrastructure. While the total number of trips made around the city by bicycle has maintained a pattern of increase over the past decade, due in part to city initiatives promoting biking through the development of new infrastructure and amenities for cyclists, the proportion of all trips in Vancouver made by bike has actually plateaued in the past 2-3 years. At just 7%, biking is still overshadowed by other modes of transportation such as driving, and even walking. This slowing of progress regarding biking has occurred despite the completion of several projects across the city, including the Arbutus Greenway (opened in 2017). Possibly caused by inconsistencies between the wants and needs of the communities and the cycling infrastructure aimed to serve them, this warrants the question that this study seeks to answer, being: • Why is it that people bike into and around UBC? This project focuses on UBC as a pilot community for a survey aiming to investigate the factors affecting people’s decisions to bike. By using a smaller subset of the population in this preliminary survey, this project is able, in addition to finding the root causes keeping people from biking, providing some context for the recent plateau in ridership proportions in Vancouver, to act as a testing ground for questions and provide the groundwork for future studies concentrating on specific factors regarding biking.Science, Faculty ofEarth, Ocean and Atmospheric Sciences, Department ofUnreviewedUndergraduat