Bicycle-Friendly Route Identification in Chicago: a Pilot Project

Within the last decade, Chicago has made substantial investments in bicycle infrastructure. However, to use these new safer routes, cyclists need to be made aware of the most “bicycle friendly” routes between two destinations. Factors that affect safety include: traffic, congestion, bike lanes, speed, limits, and construction. View Full Report.

My Contributions: Observations, Interviews, Surveys, Data analysis

Objective

Within the last decade, Chicago has made substantial investments in bicycle infrastructure. However, to use these new safer routes, cyclists need to be made aware of the most “bicycle friendly” routes between two destinations. Factors that affect safety include: traffic, congestion, bike lanes, speed, limits, and construction. Our goal was to explore how to get this information to cyclists so they can choose the safest route to their destination. We formed two hypotheses:

Cyclists that fit our “Pro” persona (rides more often, has more years of urban riding experience) plan their routes ahead of time more frequently than casual riders, and
Cyclists that fit our “Pro” persona are more likely than casual riders to plan/use routes that include major roads with no bike lanes.

Personas

Kevin Casual - I like to ride to nearby parks, markets, and friends’ apartments…”

Works full time during the day and goes to school part-time in the evenings.
Takes the CTA to and from works - riding his bike a couple times a week or less.
Primarily rides on the lakefront for exercise where he feels safest biking, but will utilize the streets for short errands, visiting friends, or going to the gym.
He doesn’t mind taking a longer route if it means there are protected bike lanes or less car and foot traffic. He doesn’t always wear a helmet, and doesn’t use hand signals.
Bike safety and planning routes ahead of time are important to Kevin so he uses Google Maps to occasionally plan his routes

Penelope Pro - “I love using my bike for all my transportation in the city and when I am not working a nice casual ride is perfect to calm my nerves…”

Commuter biker who owns several bikes and rides at least three times a week.
She works downtown and uses her bike to commute to and from work, but will also ride for pleasure.
She plans her routes frequently by using Google Maps and Chicago Bicycle forums, but feels the tools don’t give her enough real time information about the current road conditions.
Would typically choose the route that has bike lanes and the least amount of pedestrians, but is willing to ride on less bike-friendly roads if necessary to get to her destination.
She is a very safe driver — she always wears a helmet and uses hand signals.

Methods

Observations

Data collection

We conducted our observational study at eight intersections during high traffic hours (8:00am-9:00am and 4:00pm-5:00pm) at four we considered safe and four unsafe.

Each team member observed two (one safe and one unsafe) intersections for thirty minutes, taking notes using the AEIOU framework. Details we noted included bike type, cycling apparel, biking behavior, and the interaction between cyclists and the surrounding environmental influences.

Data analysis

After our observations, we transferred our notes to the online program ‘Stormboard’. We grouped cyclists into two main groups: safe and unsafe riders. We then associated several observed attributes to cyclists in these two groups.

To report the different safe and unsafe environments and attributes, we visualized the data using four birds-eye view maps. We decided what to visualize by weighing what we assessed as major factors that define (a) safe and unsafe environments and (b) safe and unsafe biking behavior.

Interviews

We based interview questions from our observation findings. We wanted to verify what we had observed. We were also interested in exploring attributes of bike safety that were not observable.

Participants

We interviewed four cyclists who bike regularly in Chicago. We recruited participants by asking family members and friends as well as people in city bike groups/clubs.

We interviewed four cyclists who bike regularly in Chicago. The participants were people who bike for commuting, exercising, and pleasure. Two participants were females, ages 25 and 35; two were males, ages 27 and 32. Two interviews were conducted at the participant's home and two were at the team members home.

Data Collection

Our questions were framed around participants’ route choices as well as safety considerations when biking. In the interviews, we asked six different groups of questions regarding their bike habits, reasons that they ride, experiences they’ve encountered, their safety habits, how they plan their routes if they do so, technologies that they use, and demographics. The interview consisted of 20 questions, with some containing follow-up questions.

Data analysis

Three team members took notes; one audio recorded the interview. We each then wrote summary versions of our interviews in order to make it easier to compare notes. In order for each of us to gain a better understanding of each of the four interviews, we individually open coded each interview. We also created spectrums to see how each interviewee compared to others, thus, playing a major role in helping us to determine our two different personas. After working individually, we regrouped via Google Hangouts and Google Drive to discuss the common themes and recurring spectrums. After virtually collaborating together, we were able to create two strong personas.

Surveys

We created an online survey to get more detailed information on the themes that we discovered from our interviews and observations. We asked 25 questions around route planning, resource use, safety, and biking experience. We created our survey using https://surveyplanet.com.

Participants

Our first question was used to screen participants by how much biking they had done during the past summer. If they had ridden fewer than 10 times, they were disqualified from the survey. We posted our survey on Facebook and the DePaul participant pool, gathering a total of 51 participants. Our participants were a variety of ages and were made up of 18 females, 31 males, and two who preferred not to specify.

Data Collection and Analysis

We conducted Mann Whitney U tests and t-tests in IBM’s SPSS software. We tested our data thoroughly to look for associations that could help us improve our personas and to test our hypotheses.

Findings

observations

We observed characteristics that improved or reduced safety and categorized them as: (1) behavioral and (2) environmental.

The majority of bikers we observed practiced largely safe behaviors. This was evidenced by the very widespread use of helmets, with other common safety paraphernalia including bike-appropriate footwear, reflective garments, and bells to notify others of their proximity. We also saw most bikers come to complete stops at traffic lights at intersections and occasional hand singles being used as well.

However, these safer behaviors were not universal. We observed a distinct minority engaging in a variety of behaviors that seemed to increase chances of an accident. For example, a common pattern was cyclists slowing down at an intersection, and instead of stopping, they would continuously inch forward towards the cross-traffic until there was a break in the line of cars just long enough for them to slip through. We also saw that at three-way intersections, many cyclists would ride through adjacent crosswalks to avoid waiting a full light cycle (see Fig. 3). This was part of a larger problem of cyclists switching back and forth from following the rules of a vehicle (riding in traffic) to the rules of a pedestrian (riding in crosswalks or on the sidewalk. See Fig. 2).

Cyclists were not the only culprits of less safe behavior: drivers and pedestrians were also observed rushing through intersections instead of yielding at yellow lights, resulting in close calls, shouting, honking, etc. Pedestrians would also use crosswalks at incorrect times, interrupting the correct flow of traffic and causing more general mayhem in the intersection.

interviews

From the analysis of our spectrum diagrams, we identified four main themes in how cyclists choose and plan their routes, and what their priorities are in those routes:

Riders want to maximize safety in their routes.
Riders find biking relaxing and want to minimize stressful riding.
Google Maps is the most widespread tool for planning a new route, but there is room for improvement.
Riders’ routes are flexible and honed over time based on personal experience.

surveys

From the results of our survey we identified four major findings. These findings include:

More professional riders do more route planning than casual riders and use a wider array of resources to do so
More professional riders are more willing to include in their routes major roads that do not have bike lanes
Experienced, planning riders engage in safer behavior
Confirmation of interview findings and improvements to personas

Discussions and Conclusions

We believe that cyclists would benefit from a clear understanding of the safest routes to their destination. While some tools exist, e.g. Google Maps and MapMyRide, there are no tools that consider the range of dynamic (e.g. congestion) and static (e.g., bike lanes) factors. Our aim in this project is to explore how to get this information to cyclists so they can choose the safest route to their destination.

Observations

To contextualize the problem, we observed cyclists in safe and unsafe intersections in Chicago. We found that cyclists at safe intersections exhibited more safe behaviors, for example, slowing down and stopping at yellow lights, as opposed to rushing through the intersection. This implied that well-designed intersections encouraged good behavior. We hypothesized that this was due to two interrelated factors: (1) everyone at the intersection (cars, bikes, pedestrians) had their own spaces so no one had the need to interact or invade the other’s space, and (2) good behavior was contagious in these situations.

Interviews

After conducting our interviews, creating spectrums and themes, we found that safety is everyone’s main concern when riding. It was also evident that most participants felt that bike lanes increase their safety when riding with fellow riders, cars, and around pedestrians. However, even though safety was a number one priority when riding, actions taken to increase safety (such as wearing a helmet or using hand signals) often depended on the current environment. We also learned that some cyclists prefer to plan their routes when riding in new areas, where others simply prefer to explore new roads on the fly.

Because of our small sample size, we were not able to gather insights from serious cyclists who do bike during the winter in stressful conditions, cyclists who have been in a serious accident, or ‘newbie’ cyclists who haven’t been riding in the city for very long, for example. Gaining more knowledge from a larger sample of users will provide insights in more specific situations.

Surveys

In our survey research, were were able to analyze results from 51 urban cyclists submissions to obtain a broader understanding of why cyclists plan their routes and ride on roads that don’t have bike lanes. Our two hypotheses for this survey, 1) Pro-ish riders will plan/use routes that include being on major roads with no bike lanes, and 2) Pro-ish riders are more into route planning than casual riders, held very true. Those that reported riding three or more times a week were more likely to plan routes ahead of time, use more resources to do so, include less bike-friendly roads in their routes, own multiple bikes, and wear a helmet.

Limitations and Future Work

While we were able to gain tremendous insights through our current research, if we were to continue this study, we recommend furthering research to other bicycle friendly urban areas across the country to cities such as San Francisco, CA and Portland, OR. By extending our research to US cities that are currently highly bicycle friendly, we would be able to study the different ways that these cities have implemented solutions to create a safe bicycle cycling environment. We would also like to interview a larger sample of cyclists in these areas to cover a wider range of ages and cycling types. Exploring already-implemented solutions in other cities would provide us with the insights to see how their solutions might transfer to the Chicago area.