Chapter 7 - If We Build It, Will They Come? Environmental Approaches to Bicycle Promotion

Abstract

It is intuitive to assume that the environment has a powerful influence on individual behavior, but this relationship is not always clear. There are myriad environmental approaches to increasing bicycling, and the impacts of such interventions are highly variable. This chapter presents an overview of the research connecting the environment to bicycling. To make this a more manageable topic, we limit our discussion to the built environment (i.e., this chapter does not discuss weather or topography) and then present environmental interventions aimed at encouraging bicycling alongside empirical evidence for their efficacy. We further divide our discussion of environmental interventions by scale: micro and macro. Common micro-scale interventions include bicycle parking or bicycle crossings, while macro-scale interventions include citywide bicycle networks. Both scales are important for fostering a bicycling-supportive environment; in fact, implementing interventions at both scales can have an additive effect, and potentially a multiplicative effect, on bicycling in a community.