Abstract
Urban transportation networks, from pavements and bicycle paths to streets and railways, provide the backbone for movement and socioeconomic life in cities. To make urban transport sustainable, cities are increasingly investing to develop their bicycle networks. However, it is yet unclear how to extend them comprehensively and effectively given a limited budget. Here we investigate the structure of bicycle networks in cities around the world, and find that they consist of hundreds of disconnected patches, even in cycling-friendly cities like Copenhagen. To connect these patches, we develop and apply data-driven, algorithmic network growth strategies, showing that small but focused investments allow to significantly increase the connectedness and directness of urban bicycle networks. We introduce two greedy algorithms to add the most critical missing links in the bicycle network focusing on connectedness, and show that they outmatch both a random approach and a baseline minimum investment strategy. Our computational approach outlines novel pathways from car-centric towards sustainable cities by taking advantage of urban data available on a city-wide scale. It is a first step towards a quantitative consolidation of bicycle infrastructure development that can become valuable for urban planners and stakeholders.
Highlights
Most modern cities have followed a car-centric development in the twentieth century [1] and are today allocating a privilegedLondon Copenhagen royalsocietypublishing.org/journal/rsos R
We find that localized investment into targeted missing links can rapidly consolidate fragmented bicycle networks, allowing to significantly increase their connectedness and directness, with potentially crucial implications for sustainable transport policy planning
We find that almost all network layers are made up of one giant component, except for the bicycle layer which is always fragmented into many disconnected components
Summary
Most modern cities have followed a car-centric development in the twentieth century [1] and are today allocating a privileged. Urban planning movements in a number of pioneering cities are increasingly experimenting with drastic policies, such as applying congestion charges (London) [7] and repurposing or removing car parking (Amsterdam, Oslo) [8,9,10]. These efforts agree in one common goal, together with the literature on cycling safety [11,12,13,14] and with cost–benefit analysis [15]. We find that localized investment into targeted missing links can rapidly consolidate fragmented bicycle networks, allowing to significantly increase their connectedness and directness, with potentially crucial implications for sustainable transport policy planning
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