Assessing Options to Enhance Bicycle and Transit Integration

Abstract

Cycling continues to increase in popularity and garner attention for the ability to achieve environmental, health, and congestion-mitigation benefits for communities. Although the growth in both cycling and transit may be in small part attributed to bicycle and transit integration, the growth is difficult to measure. Which of the variety of available strategies for bicycle and transit integration–such as increased bicycle parking at stops, increased bicycle capacity on transit vehicles, and shared bicycle infrastructure–is more cost-effective? Which strategies will yield the highest number of cycle transit users? To fill a void in the literature about integrating bicycling and transit, four common bicycle and transit integration strategies were described and assessed. A framework was developed for evaluating strategies, and a preliminary cost-effectiveness assessment was conducted. Cost-effectiveness comprises costs and cyclists’ preferences for each strategy. Preferences were gathered through stated-preference surveys from focus groups in five case study communities and calculated according to the analytic hierarchy process, a multi-criterion decision-making tool. Transit with a bicycle aboard was most preferred by cyclists, whereas results of the cost-effectiveness measure suggest that enhancing bicycle parking at a transit stop proved most cost-effective when compared with the most common bicycle onboard transit configuration: front-mounted bicycle racks on buses. The limited growth potential for bicycles aboard transit requires consideration of alternatives. The overall importance that cyclists assigned to security suggested considerable room for creative solutions to improve the favorability of the other strategies while addressing some inherent capacity limitations of the most popular strategy: transporting the bicycle with the rider on transit.