Growing Urban Bicycle Networks

Abstract

Cycling is a promising solution to unsustainable urban transport systems. However, prevailing bicycle network development follows a slow and piecewise process, without taking into account the structural complexity of transportation networks. Here we explore systematically the topological limitations of urban bicycle network development. For 62 cities we study different variations of growing a synthetic bicycle network between an arbitrary set of points routed on the urban street network. We find initially decreasing returns on investment until a critical threshold, posing fundamental consequences to sustainable urban planning: Cities must invest into bicycle networks with the right growth strategy, and persistently, to surpass a critical mass. We also find pronounced overlaps of synthetically grown networks in cities with well-developed existing bicycle networks, showing that our model reflects reality. Growing networks from scratch makes our approach a generally applicable starting point for sustainable urban bicycle network planning with minimal data requirements.

arXiv commentMain text: 14 pages, 7 figures. Website: http://growbike.net

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Cited by in corpus (13)

• Multimodal urban mobility and multilayer transport networks
• Automated Detection of Missing Links in Bicycle Networks
• Data-driven micromobility network planning for demand and safety
• BikeDNA: A Tool for Bicycle Infrastructure Data & Network Assessment
• CoolWalks for active mobility in urban street networks
• Cohesive urban bicycle infrastructure design through optimal transport routing in multilayer networks
• How Good Is Open Bicycle Infrastructure Data? A Countrywide Case Study of Denmark
• Robust design of bicycle infrastructure networks
• Demand-driven design of bicycle infrastructure networks for improved urban bikeability
• Active-travel modelling: a methodological approach to networks for walking and cycling commuting analysis
• superblockify: A Python Package for Automated Generation, Visualization, and Analysis of Potential Superblocks in Cities
• Network analysis of the Danish bicycle infrastructure: Bikeability across urban-rural divides
• Complementarity of generative models for road networks