Abstract
Summary We develop a framework for assessing the net benefits of investments to promote bicycling, which explicitly accounts for internal costs of bicycling. We apply our model to eight Swiss cities using data from the Swiss national travel survey and find that increasing the level of bicycling by reducing internal costs leads to inframarginal benefits that exceed the net benefits from the additional bicycling. We further find that Swiss cyclists only partially internalize health benefits, which affects the benefits from infrastructure investments but also implies that there is scope for “soft” measures that would inform users about health benefits of bicycling.
Highlights
Transport and urban planning branches of many local, regional and sometimes federal governments in industrialized countries have offices responsible for designing and carrying out bicycle-friendly policies, usually in coordination with other planning activities such as road construction or public transportation
The results further suggest that people are more likely to choose the bicycle, and are willing to ride longer distances, if the observed stage is part of the daily commute, or if the respondent is Swiss or has a higher education
At the sample means of steepness and age, an increase in steepness decreases the propensity to bicycle, as expected, but it decreases the internal costs of bicycling
Summary
Transport and urban planning branches of many local, regional and sometimes federal governments in industrialized countries have offices responsible for designing and carrying out bicycle-friendly policies, usually in coordination with other planning activities such as road construction or public transportation. Most existing studies about the value of bicycle investment abstract from internal costs altogether and equate the benefits associated with an increase in bicycling with the resulting gross benefits to marginal riders, mostly in the form of health benefits, and report high benefit-cost ratios (Cavill et al, 2009; Gotschi, 2011; Krizek et al, 2007; Wang et al, 2005). Borjesson et al (2012), to our knowledge, provide the only published attempt at estimating the consumer surplus of bicycling in a survey of commuter cyclists in Stockholm They find that transportation time savings are valued higher for bicycling than for other modes, indicating that bicycling is associated with a direct disutility. Information about characteristics of chosen routes, longer or repeated assessments within subjects, more detailed information about attitudes and perceptions and various other types of data would likely improve the estimation of the internal cost function
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