Cycling in urban environments: Quantitative text analysis

Abstract

IntroductionUrban transport has been dealing with traffic congestion, motorised transportation, and the huge amount of urban pollution, becoming a public health problem. Recently, cycling in urban environments has been proposed to address these problems. MethodsThis paper provides the first text-based analysis of documents included in the Scopus database related to cycling in urban environments, as it facilitates the extraction of useful knowledge for urban transport problems solving and decision making. Titles, abstracts and author keywords were analysed, resulting in 7,743 documents. ResultsThe results showed 5,678 (unique) words, with “system”, “model”, “traffic”, “public” and “travel” as the most important terms (excluding search keywords). “Physical activity” and “bike sharing system” were the most repeated bigram and trigram, respectively. Analysis of the 15 identified topics resulted in selecting the following important ones: smart urban mobility, bike sharing stations, cycling infrastructure, bicycle traffic, cycling as urban transport, and bicycling behaviour. ConclusionsThese topics indicate the interest in the structural factors of cycling in urban environments to promote cycling by offering facilities to users. However, the health benefits of cycling were found to be secondary. This study provides a useful overview to guide future research and support policies that encourage the use of active urban transport.