Cycling was a popular transport mode in post-World War II Singapore but bicycle usage had dropped drastically since the 1970s. The road infrastructure had been focused on motorised transport that transformed Singapore into a highly-urbanised motor vehicle-centric island nation. Revival of cycling began in the 1990s, mainly as recreational cycling, and to date, there are over 200km round-island park connectors. In recent years, utilitarian cycling is seeing a huge resurgence, starting from a very low base for Singapore’s case. The tight lane arrangement on road carriageways coupled with large speed differential between motorised traffic and vulnerable cyclists result in many cyclists riding on pedestrian side-walks, and crosswalks at signalised junctions. This provides strong impetus to develop serviceability standards to give guidance on developing shared/co-located off-road walking/cycling facilities in accommodating the increasing number of cyclists. Two set of serviceability standards based on human-centred approach were developed in this study, one for side-walk, the other for signalised cross-walk. For developing the standard, pedestrians gave their ratings of acceptability level as they walked in mixed pedestrian-cyclist stream along observation segments (side-walk or signalised cross-walk); for the same segments, pedestrian and cyclist movements were video-recorded for obtaining pedestrian as well as cyclist flow rates. The pedestrians’ ratings together with flow rates of pedestrians and cyclists were integrated to produce serviceability (acceptability) standards for a range of pedestrian-cum-cyclist trafficking level. All in all, serviceability rating and traffic flow data were collected from a series of sites over a wide geographical area that included 10 stretches of side-walks (and 679 pedestrian respondents) near to transit stations, and 17 signalised crosswalks (and 893 pedestrian respondents). The application of the serviceability standards is illustrated. The serviceability standards are useful for auditing the adequacy of existing facilities or when designing new integrated (shared) facilities for cyclists and pedestrians. (Author/publisher)
Abstract