A Spatial and Demographic Analysis of Cycling Safety Perceptions : a Case Study in Eau Claire, Wisconsin

Abstract

Bikeable cities provide numerous benefits to the environment, individual citizens, and communities at large, yet safety is consistently cited as a major barrier to using a bike for transportation. Geospatial methods can provide insight into areas hazardous for cycling, for the allocation of municipality resources, and improving existing cycling transportation infrastructure, ultimately resulting in safer and more sustainable communities. Through a custom web mapping application, we surveyed citizens on their perceptions of unsafe cycling locations in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. Then, we applied spatial statistics to identify clusters of problematic areas within the city and discuss differences in responses between women and men. Through these techniques, we seek to gain a greater understanding of the relationship between the built environment and the perceived bike safety in Eau Claire’s mobile spaces. While the results have tangible transportation planning implications for the city, more importantly, the free and open-source software developed for this project, along with the methods more generally, could be easily utilized in other municipalities to discover novel patterns.