Modeling the Impacts of Bicycle Facilities on Commute and Recreational Bicycling in Los Angeles County

摘要

Metropolitan planning organizations and other planning agencies are increasingly being asked to evaluate proposed bicycle facilities and select the most promising facilities for funding. The objective of this study was to develop models of utilitarian and recreational bicycling and to implement these models in a unified GIS-based framework that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA) could use for planning purposes. As part of this effort, statistical models that evaluate bicycling to work and bicycling for recreation were estimated and implemented in the framework. This paper describes a logistic regression model that is used to estimate bicycle to work mode share at the level of census tracts or traffic analysis zones (TAZ). Further, a pair of disaggregate models were estimated to evaluate trips made by bicycle for recreation. The bicycle to work model estimation generated parameter estimates that are consistent with previous literature and also add to the literature by demonstrating the importance of well connected and accessible bicycle networks to utilitarian bicycling. The recreational models provide a new way to estimate the impacts of bicycle facilities on leisure or fitness based bicycle trips. Like the work commute model, the recreational bicycling models show the importance of proximity to trails and the impact of distance as a barrier to reaching the nearest trails on the decision to bicycle for recreation.