Modeling the Impacts of Bicycle Facilities on Work and Recreational Bike Trips in Los Angeles County,California

Metropolitan planning organizations and other planning agencies increasingly are asked to evaluate proposed bicycle facilities and to select the most promising facilities for funding. The objective was to develop models of utilitarian and recreational bicycling and to implement these models in a unified geographic information system–based framework that the Los Angeles County, California, Metropolitan Transportation Authority could use for planning purposes. Statistical models that evaluate bicycling to work and bicycling for recreation were estimated and implemented in the framework. A logistic regression model was used to estimate bicycle-to-work mode share at the level of census tracts or traffic analysis zones. Furthermore, a pair of disaggregate models was estimated to evaluate bicycle trips made for recreation. The bicycle-to-work model estimation generated parameter estimates that were consistent with previous literature and added to the literature by demonstrating the importance of well-connected and accessible bicycle networks for utilitarian bicycling. The recreational models provide a new way to estimate the impacts of bicycle facilities on leisure or fitness-based bicycle trips. Like the work trip model, the recreational bicycling models show the importance of proximity to trails and the impact of distance as a barrier to reaching the nearest trails on the decision to bicycle for recreation.