Walking and cycling infrastructure priorities: Qualitative testing of a Best-Worst Scaling experiment

Abstract

Abstract The built environment plays an important role on individuals’ propensity to walk and cycle and local authorities increasingly invest financial resources towards their development. Organisations managing the built environment have developed auditing tools as guidelines to inspect routes and identify improvements to support active travel. Using several auditing tools, this study developed 21 walking and 25 cycling investment-relevant factors that were embedded into two choice-based survey instruments focusing on walking and cycling, respectively. The study aims to internally validate a preference-based elicitation approach known as Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) aimed to capture pedestrian and cyclist preferences. Preferences directly translate into investment priorities aimed at increasing the rates of walking and cycling. As part of a survey instrument, these experiments will help obtain a ranking (preference) order of the most and least important factors that are likely to encourage people to walk and cycle on a common scale. We report findings on the internal validity of the BWS choice tasks as these were examined via a series of cognitive interviews with 20 participants (10 participants for each experiment). In both sets of interviews, four themes emerged regarding how the participants approached the BWS task and six themes related to the understanding of the factors. The study findings provide insights on how participants perceive BWS experiments, which can improve our large-scale BWS survey and similar studies. Furthermore, the study aims to produce an internally consistent BWS instrument that any local authority can use to determine which walking and cycling infrastructure investments to prioritise.