FACTORS INFLUENCING BICYCLE COMMUTING BY UNIVERSITY EMPLOYEES

摘要

The environmental, economic, and health benefits of bicycling provide motivation for policymakers to promote bicycling as a means of transportation. Research has linked socio-demographic factors, individual attitudes, and characteristics of the social and physicalenvironments to the decision to bicycle. The purpose of this study is to identify and estimate theeffects of individual and socio-demographic factors in university employees’ decisions to bicycleto work in the context of a bicycle-friendly community with historically high bicycling rates.Results of binary logistic regression using data from an annual campus travel survey at theUniversity of California at Davis indicate that among university employees, individual attitudesand preferences are key determinants of bicycling, whereas socio-demographic factors such asage, income, and gender were not found to have direct effects on bicycling. Since many studieshave found gender to significantly influence bicycling behavior, gender-specific models weredeveloped, and several significant interaction effects were identified in the final model. Having agraduate degree and rating parking costs as important were found to have positive effects onbicycling among females, whereas rating travel costs as important was found to have positiveeffects among males. For both genders, bicycling comfort and liking biking increase thelikelihood of commuting by bicycle, while general need for a car, need for a vehicle for workactivities, liking driving, and rating travel convenience as important were found to decrease thelikelihood of bicycling.