Bicycle paths and cyclists' perceived levels of crowding, safety, and comfort

Recently it has become increasingly more crowded on the cycle path in especially urban areas, this has a negative side. Recent research has shown that almost 10% of the cyclists have problems with busy cycle paths. About half of the cyclists choose sometimes a different route to avoid crowdedness and about one third of the cyclists leave the bike sometimes to choose other means of transport because of the crowded bicycle paths. It appears that the intensity level also has an influence on the safety and/or comfort experience of users. Measuring the perceived crowding, safety and comfort is seen as a cognitive complex task. The use of visual images can help in presenting a wide range of variables and can lower the cognitive complexity for the respondents. The chosen attributes based on literature are: intensity level of cyclists, level of duo cyclists in the same direction, level of duo cyclists in the opposite direction, land use, pedestrian level of activity, vegetation next to the bike path, intensity of car traffic, bike path width and color of bike path. A stated preference experiment was completed by 1210 respondents in which they valuated the perceived level of crowding, safety and comfort. In the video experiment was the perspective of a cyclists shown on a two way bicycle path. The results show that all the chosen attributes have a significant influence on the valuation of the perceived crowding, safety, and comfort. The intensity of the cyclists on the bike path and the bike path width have the biggest influence on the perceived level of all three dependent variables. The rest of the attributes have a more varying roll in terms of influence on the perceived level of crowding, safety, and comfort. This research may be seen as a contribution to crowding understandings on the bike path. This results of this study can help, as an information source, in the search to the 'bicycle path of the future. Out of the results can be concluded that in order to minimize the perceived crowding and to maximize the perceived safety and comfort: the cyclist intensity should be low, all cyclists cycle behind each other, the cycle path is located downtown, there are no pedestrians next to the cycle path, bushes border the cycle path on one side, car traffic next to the cycle path should be minimalized, the cycle path width is on the other hand maximized and executed in the color red.