Cycling towards complete communities: Estimating access to destinations via low traffic stress cycling

Abstract

Cities worldwide are pursuing ‘complete community’ policies so that residents can walk or wheel safely to daily destinations. There are concerns about who benefits from these policies, but evaluation is lacking. This study investigated cycling accessibility in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. We aimed to test open-source tools, estimate cycling accessibility over time, and assess equity impacts.We used OpenStreetMap (OSM) data and r5r routing tools to estimate cycling accessibility before and after construction of the City of Victoria’s “all ages and abilities” (AAA) cycling network (2016 versus 2023). Based on local policy, we defined complete communities as having access to least one active living, community, education, food, health, and shopping destination within 15 minutes of cycling on low traffic stress routes. In 2023, 40% (155/391) of dissemination areas in Greater Victoria could be considered complete communities, an estimated 91% increase since 2016. Census data indicated a higher proportion of racialized people and people without post-secondary education lived in areas that did not meet our complete community definition.We found that the continuous improvement of OSM created challenges for parsing changes in the built environment from changes in data completeness. The r5r method for assigning level of traffic stress may not be sensitive enough to capture impacts from infrastructure interventions on busier roads, or upgrades to existing infrastructure. We share our learnings from this case study such that practitioners wanting to employ these tools in their own contexts are aware of data and decision considerations.