Monday, June 4, 2018

Four types of potential bicycle riders

I think most of us have come across the research undertaken by Roger Geller on the four types of transportation cyclists in Portland, Oregon. I have seen it referenced in multiple reports, but have also heard many questions about its applicability across geographies.

Recently I came across some research undertaken under the Transportation Research Board in the USA that aimed to expand the model to assess other cities in the USA. You can purchase the research report by Jennifer Dill on the TRB site here. I found this very useful slide presentation from 2015 on the LinkedIn Slideshare that summarises the outcomes of the research report.


Four Types of Cyclists: A National Look from TREC at PSU

Now  we just need some similar research in Australian cities. I am quite certain that the Australian population will have a similar profile of potential bicycle riders, but local research is always more pwerful to reference.

5 comments:

Glen said...

We did some research on this in Christchurch NZ, a couple of years ago, using Dill's method as a starting point. There were distinct differences in infrastructure preferences between the confident and less-confident - https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322160218_Four_Types_of_Cyclist_in_Christchurch_A_study_to_determine_cyclist_user_types_and_their_infrastructure_preferences

Athol Moore said...

THanks for sharing that Glen. It is good to get local research examples, too often international work gets cited because there is insufficient knowledge out there about local examples.

Anonymous said...

From my many discussions with people I'd call them "excuses" not "barriers". Many people say they would like to ride but really they are simply not interested enough to actually do it. Especially when driving is far too easy (eg Stevenage, England.) A typical example is a woman with teenage kids who loves exercise and lives about 8km from work on a route that mostly has bike lanes and paths. She says she can't afford to buy a bike. Yet she drives everyday and has spent far more on petrol in the last couple of years than a very good commuter bike would have cost her. I say they simply prefer to follow the flock behaviour - have a shower and get dressed at home then do the most common thing - drive to work.

Athol Moore said...

Thanks for that comment 'Anonymous'.
This is a common issue with stated preference interviews.
People's intention to choose a mode (cycle/catch the bus/walk) relates to the 'pull' factors that relates to peoples willingness to consider a choice (they value health/environment/outdoors/etc).

However, it is the 'push' factors that determine whether people actually make the choice they indicated an openness to. Push factors are ones that force a choice due to a cost implication (predominantly monetary cost and time cost). If the push factors are not there (the biggest being out-of-pocket cost such as parking pricing), or not big enough (fuel costs and congestion usually are insufficient to counteract cost benefit of free/cheap parking), the persons stated willingness to consider an available viable mode choice (such as cycling) does not translate into action.

Your example cited showed how someone showed a willingness to cycle, but the environment does not force them to make the difficult choice of shifting from a convenient mode (driving) to a mode that meets their theoretical priorities (healthy/enviro friendly/cheap/etc.).

Unknown said...

Athol as you know Jerryn and I applied the approach to the City of IPswich's community as part of our work on the preparation of the iGO Active Transport Action Plan.
The free text responses on our survey were very useful in helping us understand and confirm if we had appropriately segmented the community into those 4 categories.
We also developed our own 4 types of walkers https://www.ipswich.qld.gov.au/about_council/corporate_publications/igo-active-transport-action-plan
Kyles