Assessing the applicability of the cyclists’ Level of Traffic Stress (LTS) classification to a medium-sized city in a developing country

Abstract

IntroductionFocusing on the challenge of minimizing the level of stress to which cyclists are exposed to when cycling, the objective of this study is to assess the applicability of an important index to classify routes in terms of stress for cycling, the Level of Traffic Stress (LTS), to a medium-sized city in a developing country. MethodFor this purpose, physiological measures of stress of 15 cyclists, recorded while cycling on roads with different characteristics in the city of São Carlos, Brazil, were used to create a scale that was then compared to the LTS. In addition, applying the Random Forests technique using variables identified with video recordings collected during the trips allowed us to identify relevant causes of stress, and thus incorporate them into the LTS classification to improve their suitability to represent real-life situations. ResultsThe results showed no correlation between the LTS classification and the actual stress experienced by cyclists, but also showed that the LTS classification can be improved, bringing it closer to the actual stress experienced by cyclists, by simply adding two factors, which can be easily obtained: uphill grades and the presence of roundabouts. ConclusionsWe showed that the use of the two indicators we proposed, associated with the LTS method, are particularly interesting to classify routes according to cyclists’ stress, especially in cases when some variables (e.g., traffic volume) used in other indexes are difficult to obtain. A limitation of this study is that the data refer to a city with specific characteristics. Therefore, future works should address the validity of the method in places with different social, infrastructure and climatic characteristics and in a sample with different characteristics of gender, age and aptitude to cycle.