Methodology for planning short-term urban bike lane networks; an example of downtown Gijón

Abstract

Recently there has been increasing interest in the construction of bike lanes in cities due to their enormous positive effects; however, in some places society is resistant to these infrastructures and it is difficult to break a dynamic defined as the vicious circle of cycling mobility. In view of this, there is the option of proposing temporary bike lanes to evaluate the social response and, if successful, to make them permanent. This option is called temporary or tactical urbanism and has been widely used in the field of bicycle infrastructure during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. The problem is that there is no quick and low-cost method to determine a comprehensive and well-connected scheme of bike lanes in the whole of a city; therefore, sometimes design mistakes are made and as a consequence temporary infrastructures, far from becoming permanent, disappear. This research study proposes an agile and economical methodology to establish which streets, within those that define the urban grid as a whole, can accommodate a temporary bike lane without altering the motorised traffic grid. The method is based on the use of quantum geographic information system and on a quick and easy data collection. The method was applied to downtown Gijón, Spain.