Bicycle superhighway: An environmentally sustainable policy for urban transport

Abstract

Bicycle is a sustainable low-carbon transport mode. However, insufficient or unplanned infrastructure leads to decrease in the share of bicycle in many cities of developing nations. In order to increase the bicycle share and to provide safer, faster and more direct routes, a bicycle superhighway is proposed for urban areas. This study identifies the potential of increase in the bicycle share. For maximum utilization of the new infrastructure, an algorithm is presented to identify the optimum number and locations of the connectors between proposed new infrastructure and existing network. Household income levels are incorporated into the decision making process of individual travellers for a better understanding of the modal shift. A real-world case study of Patna, India is chosen to show the application of the proposed superhighway. It is shown that for Patna, the bicycle share can escalate as high as 48% up from 32% by providing this kind of infrastructure. However, together with bicycles, allowing motorbikes on the superhighway limits the bicycle share to 44%. The increase in bicycle share is mainly a result of people switching from motorbike, public transport and walk to the bicycle. Further, to evaluate the benefits of the bicycle superhighway, this study first extends an emission modelling tool to estimate the time-dependent, vehicle-specific emissions under mixed traffic conditions. Allowing only bicyclists on the superhighway improves congested urban areas, reduces emissions, and increases accessibility. However, allowing motorbikes on the superhighway increases emissions significantly in the central part of the urban area and reduces accessibilities by bicycle mode to education facilities which are undesirable. This study elicits that a physically segregated high-quality bicycle superhighway will not only attract current noncyclist travellers and increase the share of the bicycle mode, but will also reduce negative transport externalities significantly.

On-road Air Pollution Exposure to Cyclists in an Agent-Based Simulation Framework

“…The EMT is proposed by Hülsmann et al 2011and further improved by Kickhöfer et al (2013). To calculate the emissions for variety of vehicles, the EMT is further extended by Agarwal et al (2017a). The schematic of the emission modeling tool is shown in Fig.…”

“…For this, a Bayesian framework-based calibration technique (Flötteröd et al, 2011;Flötteröd, 2009) is used which implicitly models location-choice (see Agarwal et al, 2017b, for details about the calibration procedure). The calibrated scenario is further used for a "Business-As-Usual" (BAU) scenario and a policy scenario (Agarwal et al, 2017a).…”

“…A bicycle superhighway is proposed along the existing railway line to handle the high bicycle share in Patna (Agarwal et al, 2017a). Hereon, this policy is referred as 'BSH-b'.…”

“…Clearly, due to increase in the number of cyclists for BSH-b scenario, average PM 2.5 per trip increases for other zones. Since, the new cyclists are not captive to the bicycle mode, Agarwal et al (2017a) propose the bicycle superhighway on ground parallel to the railway track and major arterials, however, it is likely that in another real-world scenario, a bicycle superhighway is over head. In the latter case, the cyclists are not directly or to a lesser extent affected by the exhaust emissions but still exposed to the background air pollution.…”

Dynamic, multi- and intermodal bike sharing in agent-based modelling

“…Similar to the approach of this paper, relevant characteristics of infrastructure for cycling were added and the scoring function was updated. With multimodal developments the impact of a bicycle superhighway interacting with other means of transport was analyzed for India [30,31,32]. For bs it is important to derive detailed information about the potential of such a system, therefore this paper introduces a module to simulate bs on a fine-grained infrastructure network.…”