Bicycle Accessibility GIS Analysis for Bike Master Planning with a Consideration of Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) and Energy Consumption

Measuring the impact of bicycle infrastructure and other mobility improvements has been a challenge in the practice of transportation planning. Transportation planners are increasingly required to conduct complex analyses to provide supporting evidence for proposed plans and communicate well with both decision makers and the public. Cyclists experience two important factors on roads: (a) travel stress related to the built environment along with the traffic conditions and (b) changes in physical burden due to topography. This study develops a method that integrates an energy consumption calculation and “bicycling stress” score to take into account external conditions that influence cyclists substantially. In this method, the level of traffic stress (LTS) is used to select street segments appropriate for different comfort levels among cyclists and is combined with biking energy consumption, in addition to distance, which is used as travel impedance to consider the effects of slopes and street intersections. The integrated Geographic Information System (GIS) analysis methods are used to evaluate bicycle infrastructure improvements in the coming years in Montgomery County, MD, USA. The analysis results demonstrated that the infrastructure improvements in the county’s bike master plan are well-targeted to improve bicycling accessibility. Furthermore, the use of energy as opposed to distance to generate bikeshed areas results in smaller bikesheds compared to distance-generated bikesheds. The method presented herein allows planners to characterize and quantify the impact of bicycle infrastructure and prioritize locations for improvements.