National Center for Sustainable Transportation

Bicycle transportation is often excluded from travel demand and route choice models. Even when bicycle modes are incorporated, models may use a simplified network that does not contain all streets and bicycle paths that a cyclist could feasibly take. These models may also only use trip distance and travel time when modelling a cycling trip; research on revealed route choice preferences of cyclists has shown that cyclist routing is influenced by other factors, such as the presence of a bicycle facility or road elevation gain. The City of Atlanta plans to triple its mileage of protected bicycle infrastructure in the next two years, and needs a tool to be able to plan and prioritize these projects based on the estimated effects on bicycle accessibility, bicycle mode share, energy usage, and emissions, to make the best use of the limited funding. The objective of this project is to develop this analytical tool and an associated network that includes all possible bicycle paths (i.e., roads, bicycle paths, cut-through paths, etc.) for a 12 square mile study area in the City of Atlanta that can be expanded later to the Atlanta Metro area. The tool, BikewaySim, is a shortest path calculator that uses Dijkstra’s shortest path algorithm to find both the preferred route from any origin to any destination within the study area using lowest travel time and lowest total impedance cost. The BikewaySim network was created by conflating network data from the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC), OpenStreetMap (OSM), and HERE into a whole road and pathway for BikewaySim and future use in the ARC’s activity-based travel demand model. The methods for conflating networks and developing the shortest path model are publicly available resources. The final model is destined to include all viable pathways and incorporate cyclist preferences for use in planning and modelling bicycle travel for research, planning, and design. The framework allows other organizations and researchers to contribute to the project over time.

View the NCST Project Webpage