It added up to a major road diet on part of the street (from five general travel lanes to three) and much less auto parking on another part (a 30 percent cut total). So what happened? Using sales tax data, the city compared retail sales along Broadway in the first half of 2013, before the changes, to the first half of 2015. Along the project route, sales rose 8.8 percent, compared to 7 percent citywide.
We find that people underestimate the total cost of owning a car by about 50%. We also found that providing personalized information on the costs of car ownership increased respondents’ willingness to pay for a public-transport ticket by around 22% (see Supplementary information; SI). We estimate that educating people in Germany about the true cost could reduce car ownership by up to 37% and cut associated transport emissions by 23%. Here, we suggest labelling and communication policies that could help to speed the transition to cleaner transport.
Problem, research strategy, and findings: Bike lane projects on retail streets have proved contentious among merchant associations in North America, especially when they reduce on-street parking. A limited but growing number of studies, however, detect neutral to positive consequences for merchants following bike lane implementation. In 2016, the City of Toronto (Canada) removed 136 on-street parking spots and installed a pilot bike lane on a stretch of Bloor Street, a downtown retail corridor. Using a case–control and pre–post design, we surveyed merchants and shoppers to understand the impacts of the bike lanes on economic activities. We find no negative economic impacts associated with the bike lanes: Monthly customer spending and number of customers served by merchants both increased on Bloor Street during the pilot.
Takeaway for practice: Our findings are consistent with an improving economic environment at the intervention site. Downtown retail strips may therefore be suited to tolerate bike lanes and even benefit from increased retail activity. Pre and post surveys can provide valuable insights into local economic impacts of streetscape changes affecting merchants along city streets, especially where access to sales data is limited.
We reviewed published and unpublished studies that presented the findings of an economic valuation of an aspect of transport infrastructure or policy, and included data on walking and/or cycling and health effects in the valuation. We included 16 papers, of which three were classified as ‘high; six as ‘moderate’ and seven as ‘low’ quality. There is a wide variation in the approaches taken for including the health effects of physical activity in economic analyses of transport projects. This is not helped by a lack of transparency of methods in many studies. A more standardised approach is called for, including a clearer description of the applied methods and assumptions taken.
Results from all establishment types show that customers who arrive by automobile spend more on average per trip than others(see Table 1). Taking the frequency of visits into account, however, reveals a different result—cyclists are greater spenders on average. The monthly differences are not statistically significant, however, and suggest that business owners may not realize gains by appealing to customers solely on their mode choices. When consumer expenditures by mode of travel are examined in the context of the establishment’s location, statistically significant differences emerge. The contexts include central business district (CBD); urban core—the central city outside of the CBD; neighborhood centers—commercial centers within neighborhoods; and low-density suburban business districts. Establishments in the urban core receive the highest average expenditures per visit across all modes at $14.55, followed by establishments in neighborhood centers at $11.55, in the CBD at $11.07, and in suburban contexts at $10.08 (see Figure 1). Patrons who arrive by automobile spend more per visit in all urban contexts, but the expenditures vary across contexts for consumers.
City officials and planners have shown increased interest in pedestrian- and bicycle-friendly designs aimed at addressing urban problems such as traffic congestion, pollution, sprawl and housing availability. An important planning consideration is the economic impact associated with existing or planned infrastructure, especially in relation to home property values. In this study, we use measures of infrastructure and ridership to evaluate the relationship between bicycling infrastructure and activity and single-family home values in Tempe, Arizona. We apply a hedonic modelling approach and find that bicycle infrastructure density is positively associated with home sale price, while ridership density around home locations has no significant relationship with sale price. Our results inform discourse related to the potential economic values of residential bicycle infrastructure, especially in areas where property tax is a source of local public finance revenue. We show that the characteristics of bicycle-friendly design may be the same characteristics valued by homebuyers and the resulting increased home sale values may lead to increased property tax revenue in Tempe, Arizona.
Pedestrian and bicycling infrastructure such as sidewalks, bike lanes, and trails, can all be used for transportation, recreation, and fitness. These types of infrastructure have been shown to create many benefits for their users as well as the rest of the community. Some of these benefits are economic, such as increased revenues and jobs for local businesses, and some are non-economic benefits such as reduced congestion, better air quality, safer travel routes, and improved health outcomes. While other studies have examined the economic and non economic impacts of the use of walking and cycling infrastructure, few have analyzed the employment that results from the design and construction of these projects. In this study we estimate the employment impacts of building and refurbishing transportation infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians. We analyze various transportation projects and use state specific data to estimate the number of jobs created within each state where the project is located.
Overall we find that bicycling infrastructure creates the most jobs for a given level of spending: For each $1 million, the cycling projects in this study create a total of 11.4 jobs within the state where the project is located. Pedestrian-only projects create an average of about 10 jobs per $1 million and multi-use trails create nearly as many, at 9.6 jobs per $1 million. Infrastructure that combines road construction with pedestrian and bicycle facilities creates slightly fewer jobs for the same amount of spending, and road-only projects create the least, with a total of 7.8 jobs per $1 million. On average, the 58 projects we studied create about 9 jobs per $1 million within their own states. If we add the spill-over employment that is created in other states through the supply chain, the employment impact rises by an average of 3 additional jobs per $1 million.
Holiday cycling refers to the occasional use of bicycle during holidays as an alternative mode of transportation for exploring a destination, comprising a promising line of business for rental services of both conventional and electric bicycles (e-bikes), not only in countries with well-established cycling culture, but also in other tourist destinations. This paper advances the notion that a hotel-based e-bike rental service significantly contributes to the guests’ perception on the environmental quality and friendliness of the hotel, particularly if the e-bikes are powered by renewable energy sources, as a tourism product offering in the context of sustainable mobility. To that end, the present work employs a stated preference survey among hotel guests in the city of Mons, Belgium, to capture and analyze the user profile characteristics and preferences. Based on the survey results, it simulates two alternative implementations of the e-bike charging station with a well-established energy systems analysis tool and evaluates the techno-economic feasibility of the proposed service under different usage and pricing scenarios. The findings of this work show that all scenarios lead to positive internal rate of return and return on investment, rendering the proposed e-bike rental service a promising business venture.
Background. Our objective is to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of investments in bike lanes using New York City's (NYC) fiscal year 2015 investment as a case study. We also provide a generalizable model, so that localities can estimate their return on bike lane investments.
Methods and findings. We evaluate the cost-effectiveness of bike lane construction using a two-stage model. Our regression analysis, to estimate the marginal addition of lane miles on the expansion in bike ridership, reveals that the 45.5 miles of bike lanes NYC constructed in 2015 at a cost of $8 109 511.47 may increase the probability of riding bikes by 9.32%. In the second stage, we constructed a Markov model to estimate the cost-effectiveness of bike lane construction. This model compares the status quo with the 2015 investment. We consider the reduced risk of injury and increased probability of ridership, costs associated with bike lane implementation and maintenance, and effectiveness due to physical activity and reduced pollution. We use Monte Carlo simulation and one-way sensitivity analysis to test the reliability of the base-case result. This model reveals that over the lifetime of all people in NYC, bike lane construction produces additional costs of $2.79 and gain of 0.0022 quality-adjusted life years (QALYs) per person. This results in an incremental cost-effectiveness ratio of $1297/QALY gained (95% CI −$544/QALY gained to $5038/QALY gained).
Conclusions. We conclude that investments in bicycle lanes come with an exceptionally good value because they simultaneously address multiple public health problems. Investments in bike lanes are more cost-effective than the majority of preventive approaches used today.
Evidence supports the multi-functional nature of urban green space, and so economic evaluations should have a broad lens in order to capture their full impact. Given the evidence for a range of health, wellbeing, social and environmental benefits of such interventions, we modelled the potential social return on investment of a new urban greenway intervention in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Areas that the greenway was purported to impact upon included: land and property values; flood alleviation; tourism; labour employment and productivity; quality of place; climate change; and, health. The most recent and applicable evidence pre-development of the greenway for each area was summarised to obtain an ‘effect estimate’; this was then applied to available data for the greenway area and the impact estimated and monetised using various methods. To calculate the Benefit Cost Ratio all seven monetary benefits were summed, for both a worst case and best case scenario, and divided by the total investment cost. The Benefit Cost Ratio ranged from 2.88 to 5.81 (i.e. for every £1.00 invested in the greenway, there would be £2.00–6.00 returned). This is one of the first studies to conduct a social return on investment of a new urban greenway estimating the potential benefits.
In terms of revenue, cycling customers spend a total of 2.05 billion € per year whereas car driving customers spend slightly less, that is 2.04 billion € per year. In total, walking and cycling customers count for 55% of the total revenue of street-level shops and supermarkets in Copenhagen.
A walkable environment is a crucial factor for promoting active transportation. The purpose of this study is to examine the association between neighborhood walkability and active transportation for noncommuting purposes (leisure and shopping) in Seoul, Korea. The Walkability Score is used as a measure of walkability, and a multilevel logistic regression model is employed to measure the odds of active transportation (i.e., walking and cycling; nonmotorized trips) at two levels: individual (level 1) and neighborhood (level 2). The results of the study showed that the Walkability Score was significantly correlated with higher odds of active transportation in shopping models. Specifically, every one-point increase in the Walkability Score was associated with 1.5%–1.8% higher odds of active transportation in shopping models. However, there was no significant correlation between the two in leisure models. Meanwhile, individual characteristics associated with the odds of active transportation differed in the leisure and shopping models. Older age was positively correlated with the odds of active transportation in the leisure model, while females showed a positive correlation in the shopping model. Based on the study, urban and transportation planners can recommend urban policies to promote active transportation in an urban setting.
Planners propose multi-use urban greenways to enhance urban form, promote conservation of habitat and biodiversity, provide opportunities for fitness, recreation, and transportation, and promote economic development. This paper presents a taxonomy of the values of greenways and illustrates how two particular types of values can be measured using complementary techniques. Impacts of greenways on property values in Indianapolis, Indiana are measured with geographic information systems (GIS) and hedonic price modeling using residential real estate sales data from 1999. Recreation values are measured for a greenway trail in Indianapolis with the travel cost method using data from a 2000 survey of trail users and counts of trail traffic taken in 1996. We show that some but not all greenways have a positive, significant effect on property values and that the recreation benefits of a trail exceed costs. Limitations of the approaches are reviewed, and the importance of values not amenable to quantification is discussed. The paper concludes with discussion of the implications of our findings. Planners can use the findings to illustrate the benefits of greenways, to address concerns about negative impacts of greenway systems, and to inform and design research studies.
This study is the first of its kind to explore the relationship between commuting behavior and employee productivity by drawing theories from multiple disciplines and providing empirical evidence from Australian cities. Relying on survey data collected from three major cities in Australia, this study finds that commuting distance is positively associated with absenteeism. This study also finds a positive association between active commuting (i.e., travel to work by walking or bicycling) and job performance in the middle-aged employees. The structural equation model further explored possible causal pathways from commuting to employee productivity, and the results reveal that commuting mode choices and commuting distance influence absenteeism and job performance through affecting commuting satisfaction and personal health, though commuting distance retains a direct impact on absenteeism after controlling for the indirect effects. In particular, the results suggest that the happy commuters are more productive, and the short-distance and active travel commuters are more likely to be the happy commuters. Overall, these findings support that commuting behaviors of employees influence their productivity at the workplace. Encourage active commuting not only improves the physical health of employees, but may also enhance their job performance, contributing to the economic benefits to employers and society.
Increased physical activity is associated with numerous health benefits. This study investigated the effect of active commuting (walking and cycling to work) on health‐related quality of life (HRQoL) and absence days from work due to sickness in healthy working adults. In total, 73 participants (age: 46 ± 9 years), all working at a tertiary university hospital in Salzburg, Austria, were randomized into an intervention group (IG, n=51) and a control group (CG, n=22). The IG was asked to commute actively for twelve months, whereas the CG did not have to change their usual commuting behavior. IG was divided into two subgroups: IG‐C (cycling, n=26) was asked to commute by bicycle and IG‐PT (public transport, n=25) partially using public transportation and walked the remaining distance to work.
Significant positive changes in IG were observed in four sub‐components of the SF‐36 (physical functioning (95 [10] to 100 [8.8], p=0.023), mental health (82 [15] to 86 [15], p=0.036), vitality (65 [20] to 70 [14], p=0.005) and general health (70 [19] to 80 [24], p=0.004)) as well as the physical component summary score (56.5 [9] to 59.2 [6.3], p=0.002). IG‐C showed greater and more statistically significant changes regarding HRQoL compared to IG‐PT. Associations between active commuting and sick leave days were only observed in IG‐PT (7.5 [14.8] to 4.0 [11.3] days, p=0.038). In conclusion, active commuting improves various components of HRQoL and might therefore be a possible strategy to increase quality of life in the workforce.
Drawing on the existing literature, and making some broad provisional calculations from this data, we estimate that cycling contributes around £5.4 billion a year to the economy, with the larger share of this, £4.1b, coming from wider impacts, particularly reductions in loss of life, and reduced pollution and congestion. Products associated with the cycling industry contribute £0.7b, while tourism attributable to cycling contributes, at least, a further £0.5b. Cycling generates around 64,000 FTE jobs in the UK including jobs in tourism, sales and repair, cycle delivery, manufacturing, and cycle infrastructure.
The majority of studies indicate that the presence of a bike path/trail either increases property values and ease of sale slightly or has no effect. Studies have shown that neighbors of many bike paths/trails feel that the quality of life of their neighborhood has been improved, that the trails were a good use of open space, and in the case of abandoned railways were an improvement from before the trails went in. There is definitely a large portion of the population that sees bike paths as an amenity and will seek out residences near trails, parks, and other natural resource areas. Some studies express that those recently moving into areas near bike paths are generally more favorable to the paths than those who have lived in neighborhoods before the construction of a trail. In some areas a large majority of neighbors are very happy with the trails, even some who were originally opposed to their construction.
Annualised infrastructure costs in compact, less car-dependent metropolises are 33% less than in low-density, car-oriented ‘sprawl’. Cyclists visit local shops more regularly, spending more than users of most other modes of transport. Per square metre, cycle parking delivers 5 times higher retail spend than the same area of car parking. Cycling schemes can achieve more for less, with benefit-to-cost ratios in the in the range of 5:1 to 19:1 – some as high as 35.5:1. Cycle freight offers a competitive advantage in city locations and is cheaper than motorised freight for small payloads over short distances. Cost savings range between 39% and 64% compared to a van-based service.
The total cost of ownership for a car is $955 per month when you include all your car payments, gas, maintenance, and auto insurance costs. After 3 years, you’ve paid for your car in full, and your payments drop to $502 per month.
Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria – better known as BBVA – compared the 2018 takings with retail data from two previous Christmas periods, and found a 3.3% increase in spending across the whole of Madrid thanks to the restriction on car use in the central area. The study, carried out in association with the City of Madrid, measured sales between December 1, 2018 and January 7, 2019.
According to a report in El Pais, emissions of nitrogen oxide fell by 38% in Madrid’s center the first month the program was implemented, while carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 14.2%.
People not in cars spend 40% more each month in shops than motorists.