Integrating Bicycle Travel Demand into a Land-Use and Transport Model of the Greater Boston Area

In the last decades, travel demand models have progressed with tremendous development and are now routinely used to support planning and public policy decisions. However, active modes have often been overlooked and rarely considered as part of the solution to improve the global quality of the transportation system. This thesis is concurrent to the renaissance of active mobility in major cities and is motivated by the fact that the bicycle mode, in particular, has been scarcely documented and researched yet, even though it is a resourceful mode of transportation for the city and urban areas. This research explores the profiles of the cyclists and the elements that make an environment "cycling friendly", first by assessing the perception of urban form convenience, and second by inte- grating bicycle as an additional alternative of the choice set in a land-use and transport model of the Greater Boston Area. The estimation and test of the mode choice models show that socioeconomics, demographics and trip information are not sufficient to describe the decision making process of cyclists. The integration of origin and destination urban form features tend to yield better predictions. The land-use and transport model helped in running different scenarios to analyze the bicycle travel demand evolution. The results show that automobiles create a gap of accessibility, and that active modes are more resilient in case of network disruption when car is not an alternative of the choice set. Finally, extending the bicycle network (paths and lanes) increases the bicycle travel demand by decreasing the number of walking trips. Promoting active mobility must go along with concurrent actions that reduce the attractiveness of competing alternatives.