Abstract
Transportation specialists, urban planners, and public health officials have been steadfast in encouraging active modes of transportation over the past decades. Conventional thinking, however, suggests that providing infrastructure for cycling and walking in the form of off-street trails is critically important. An outstanding question in the literature is how one’s travel is affected by the use of such facilities and specifically, the role of distance to the trail in using such facilities. This research describes a highly detailed analysis of use along an off-street facility in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. The core questions addressed in this investigation aim to understand relationships between: (1) the propensity of using the trail based on distance from the trip origin and destination, and (2) how far out of their way trail users travel for the benefit of using the trail and explanatory factors for doing so. The data used in the analysis for this research was collected as a human intercept survey along a section of an off-street facility. The analysis demonstrates that a cogent distance decay pattern exists and that the decay function varies by trip purpose. Furthermore, we find that bicyclists travel, on average, 67% longer in order to include the trail facility on their route. The paper concludes by explaining how the distance decay and shortest path versus taken path analysis can aid in the planning and analysis of new trail systems.
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Notes
The survey allowed eight reasons for using the trail. In the interest of parsimony, we aggregated the responses into three categories: work/school (commute to work; go to or from school/university), shopping (go shopping/run errands), recreation (get exercise, walk pet, enjoy scenery, socialize, go to meet family/friends).
In a perfect world, we would also be able to use their described origin and destination location. For reasons described in a later footnote, this field was not well populated with usable information. In order to maximize the number of respondents used to estimate the distance-decay curves, we assumed respondents were traveling to or from their home and calculated the network distance from their home location to the nearest trail access point (entrance or exit)—an assumption we feel preserves the integrity of the data.
While the trail system is very attractive, Fig. 2 shows over half of the survey locations are within 10 or so blocks of the “Chain of Lakes” in Minneapolis. This area is highly cherished among walkers due to its recreational and scenic amenities, which helps explain the relatively low levels of walking along the nearby trail being analyzed.
The trail was not accessible at every street intersection because of grade separation. This analysis only measures network distances to each access point in the trail.
For this latter analysis, we used responses from the specific origin, rather than their home location. The poor reporting of the data, however, considerably lowered the number of usable responses (described further below).
Satisfying all of these requirements considerably lowered the number of usable responses. For example, a total of 595 respondents answered each of these questions. Another 420 respondents were eliminated for providing unidentifiable locations (i.e., “drugstore”) or for listing the same access and egress point (e.g., a recreational “loop” trip). Finally, non-cyclists and respondents that did not specify a trip purpose or had a missing value in any field were excluded. The remaining 142 records were included in the statistical analysis.
We tallied the number of crashes and intersections within a 200 m buffer of both the shortest and chosen routes. For the route chosen, the trail segment itself was not buffered and no crashes or intersections were counted along the trail segment.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported in large part by the University of Minnesota Obesity Prevention Center. The authors thank Robb Luckow of Hennepin County for collecting and sharing the data analyzed in this report and Mike Iacono and Jessica Horning for assisting with the review of relevant literature.
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Krizek, K.J., El-Geneidy, A. & Thompson, K. A detailed analysis of how an urban trail system affects cyclists’ travel. Transportation 34, 611–624 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-007-9130-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11116-007-9130-z