Principal Investigator
- Michael Levin, Assistant Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering
Co-Investigators
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Alireza Khani, Associate Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering
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Raphael Stern, Associate Professor, Civil, Environmental and Geo-Engineering
Summary
In 2021, a total of 966 cyclists were killed and 41,615 injured in the U.S. due to collisions with motor vehicles, but encouraging biking is highly important for helping meet Minnesota's transportation goals. Therefore, biking needs better support through safe and comfortable bike infrastructure. The main issues around constructing new bike infrastructure include where they should be built and whether the benefits justify the costs. This project is developing tools to answer critical questions towards supporting bike infrastructure: If new infrastructure is built, how many cyclists will use and benefit from it? How does the addition of bike infrastructure on specific roads affect transportation accessibility? Where should bike infrastructure be built to best improve equitable accessibility? How much bike infrastructure needs to be constructed to ensure a minimum level of safety? In the past, it has been difficult to answer these questions due to limited data on biking travel patterns, but a recent Minnesota Department of Transportation (MnDOT) project that estimated bike volumes from mobile-sourced data has created new opportunities to quantify bike lane benefits. Constructing new bike infrastructure on a road would benefit cyclists who already travel down that road, but since cyclists are willing to travel longer distances to use bike infrastructure for safer travel, route shifts would increase the number of cyclists who benefit. Researchers' first goal is to predict the number of cyclists who would benefit from new bike infrastructure, using the Met Council Travel Behavior Inventory to cluster cyclists into different classes of users based on their demographics and travel goals to predict whether origin-destination travelers would benefit from new bike lanes. Then, researchers study how new bike infrastructure would improve safe and equitable accessibility for cyclists. The project outcomes are a tool that will predict the benefits of specific new bike infrastructure (evaluation) and suggest locations for new bike infrastructure to improve safety and accessibility (optimization).