Exploring Neighborhood Differences in Bicycling Accessibility to Physical and Virtual Workplaces

Abstract

Health concerns brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic, coupled with technological advancements over the past two decades have altered the traditional workplace setting. Some professionals in the tertiary and quaternary economic sectors have grown accustomed to virtual working environments, whereas others, including essential workers, have experienced less flexibility in this regard and continue to commute to physical work settings. During the pandemic, residents of underresourced communities, who were more likely to adopt lower-cost shared-use travel modes and would have benefited from good access to high-quality bicycling infrastructure, embodied a greater share of the nonhealthcare workforce who was required to commute to a physical work setting. This circumstance highlighted a need for research that examines bicycling accessibility to workplaces distinguished by telework potential, with a hypothesis that underresourced communities with more limited mobility options have poorer bicycling access to traditional workplace settings. In response, this study, which describes the application of a novel bicyclist routing algorithm, investigated how these differences in job accessibility relate to variations in the social context of neighborhoods where bicyclist commute trips originate, and the level of traffic stress incurred by a current or prospective bicyclist along modeled routes in Flagstaff, AZ. Study findings, which in part confirmed its hypothesis while also noting a latent demand for bicycling to physical workplaces along low-stress facilities, offer unique insights into how the changing nature of work should be accounted for as active transportation planners and policy makers seek to provide safer and more robust bicycle networks to their diverse communities.