Bicycle facility planning using GIS and multi-criteria decision analysis

Sustainable transport has become an important goal in transportation planning and research in recent decades. One emphasis of sustainable transport is to develop a multi-modal transportation system, in which bicycling facility planning is playing an important role. Recently, many bicycle facility planning methods have been proposed, and can be divided into two groups: supply- and demand-based models. While these two groups of models have been applied separately, few studies, however, have incorporated variables from these two groups of models together for bicycle facility planning. To address this issue, this paper proposes a multi-criteria evaluation (MCE) analysis to integrate both supply- and demand-based criteria for bicycle facility planning. Analysis was performed at two geographic levels: network level and neighborhood level, and a Geographic Information System (GIS) based exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) method was applied to explore the spatial patterns of bicycle facilities at the neighborhood level. This model was applied to Milwaukee City, WI, U.S.A., and results suggest that a combination of GIS and MCE analysis can serve as a better alternative to plan for optimal bicycle facilities, highlighting inadequacies of typical supply-side measures, and meet multiple planning objectives of government agencies, planners and bicyclists.