Analysis of bicycle commuter routes using GPSs and GIS

This paper reports on the information obtained by analyzing actual urban bicycle-commuter routes in a Brazilian medium-sized city using Global Positioning Systems (GPSs) for collecting the data and a Geographic Information System (GIS) for analyzing the data. In order to accomplish this objective, the actual routes used by cyclists were compared with the shortest-path routes, by means of the extra distance travelled. To therefore determine which characteristics that influences the choice between the two paths.
The information collected showed that the speed of motorized traffic and volume (proxi variable, from classification of the roads) at the last, quality of the pavement influence directly in choosing the way to go. Other observed characteristics in this work, not shown to have great importance on the route selection, the absolute difference in most of the variable means were very small. The first part reports the motivations and goals of this paper, followed by a brief literature review on work carried out in the same scope, in the chapter 2. The third chapter describes the methods of data collection for this research and the compared with the shortest paths. Following chapter, describe the resulting from this information's, finally chapter 5 presents conclusions and limitations of this paper.