CONTRIBUTIONS OF THE PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT TO BICYCLING: A STRUCTURAL EQUATION MODELING STUDY

摘要

The level of bicycling is low in the United States compared to some European countries withsimilar living standards and auto ownership. Differences in the physical and social environmentsin these countries help to explain much higher levels of bicycling in Europe than the US.Previous bicycling research has established a potential association between environmentalfactors and bicycling. However, empirical evidence of whether physical and social environmenthave true impacts on individual bicycling, as well as what their relative importance is, is stilllimited. Using data from an online survey conducted in 2006 in six small cities in the westernUnited States, this study aims to address these questions by employing structural equationsmodeling, which accounts for endogeneities between variables and thereby more robust thansingle equation models. The empirical findings show that individual attitudes, especially theattitude of liking bicycling, have the greatest impact on bicycling behavior. The socialenvironment emerges as the second most important factor. Physical environment variables alsoinfluence bicycling after accounting for residential self-selection. This study provides a strongerempirical basis for policy decisions promoting bicycling by contributing to an improvedunderstanding of the influences of physical and social environments on bicycling.