Complete Street strategies in cycleways applied in district with high delivery demand to reduce travel costs

Abstract

Currently, the implementation of bicycle lanes is one of the main ways to improve the dense traffic existing in the main cities of each country. This is because they take the bicycle and use it as a sustainable means of transportation that, in addition to caring for the environment, helps to reduce the vehicular load directly. However, many cities have started with a distribution of their streets that initially focused only on motorized vehicles and did not consider the consequences that this would entail. This, and with the advent of COVID-19, many of the bicycle lanes have been implemented in an improvised manner, sacrificing aspects such as safety, connectivity and the level of impact on other modes of transport. Faced with this problem, the study proposes an analysis from a different point of view than the conventional one, applying "Complete Street" (CS) strategies, seeking a new proposal that satisfies not only the needs of cyclists, but also the balance between all users who interact with the streets. This article will take the current scenario of an area with a high demand for delivery in the city of Lima, Peru; an area that includes 5 districts of Lima with a high population rate, will compare it with a proposal for a regularized bicycle lane layout under the criteria of CS, and will analyze with the software Grafos under the Graph Theory the trip times between the main points of demand and supply. The effectiveness of the proposal was validated through projected user surveys, meeting all the criteria that make up the CS and the acceptance of all stakeholders. The results obtained through the graph compared the travel times for both the current scenario and the proposed bicycle lanes, which managed to demonstrate an existing improvement in travel times (minutes) between the main generating and attracting points, reducing them by 75% and 60% compared to the current scenario.