Environmental determinants of cycling: Not seeing the forest for the trees?

In recent years, the volume of studies in the fields of transport and urban planning seeking to identify environmental determinants or correlates of cycling has expanded dramatically. This viewpoint wishes to put forward a provocative argument: namely, that while further research in this area might refine our theoretical understanding of certain issues, it is unlikely to deliver any fundamentally new policy-relevant insights as to what measures need to be taken in order to increase urban cycling rates. At present, the difficulties faced by the vast majority of cities across the world in encouraging cycling are not derived from a lack of theoretical knowledge, but are fundamentally practical and political in nature. From a practical perspective, I argue that we already know enough about what needs to be done in order to encourage cycling in the vast majority of urban contexts. The problem with the seemingly endless proliferation of research on the relationship between cycling and environmental characteristics, I suggest, is that it risks giving the impression that there is some fundamental unresolved uncertainty about what is needed to make a city more cycling-friendly, when this is simply not the case. Instead of focusing on cycling itself, I suggest that exploring the phenomenon of traffic evaporation may be a more fruitful way for researchers to advance the cause of urban cycling

Assessing the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and cycling: Findings from Amsterdam

Although a variety of studies have sought to assess the relationship between urban form characteristics and cycling levels (Muhs & Clifton, 2016), few of them have done so in contexts where cycling constitutes a dominant form of transport. In the present study, we statistically explore the relationship between cycling levels, urban form and sociodemographic variables in Amsterdam at a postcode level of detail. Overall, our findings suggest that in a mature cycling city like Amsterdam, there exists a clear relationship between urban form and cycling rates, and that this relationship is probably stronger than in less mature cycling contexts. While cycling is significantly correlated with a variety of land use and destination accessibility variables, the most important underlying relationship appears to be between address density and cycling; after accounting for address density, other urban form variables are not significant predictors of cycling levels. However, we also found that the relation between cycling and address density becomes insignificant once we take the ethnicity and educational level of postcode residents into account. Given the strong positive association between address density and the educational level of postcode residents, it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of these two variables on local cycling rates