Predicting Cyclist Speed in Urban Contexts: A Neural Network Approach

Abstract

Bicycle use has become more important today, but more information and planning models are needed to implement bike lanes that encourage cycling. This study aimed to develop a methodology to predict the speed a cyclist can reach in an urban environment and to provide information for planning cycling infrastructure. The methodology consisted of obtaining GPS data on longitude, latitude, elevation, and time from a smartphone of two groups of cyclists to calculate the speeds and slopes through a model based on a recurrent short-term memory (LSTM) type neural network. The model was trained on 70% of the dataset, with the remaining 30% used for validation and varying training epochs (100, 200, 300, and 600). The effectiveness of recurrent neural networks in predicting the speed of a cyclist in an urban environment is shown with determination coefficients from 0.77 to 0.96. Average cyclist speeds ranged from 6.1 to 20.62 km/h. This provides a new methodology that offers valuable information for various applications in urban transportation and bicycle line planning. A limitation can be the variability in GPS device accuracy, which could affect speed measurements and the generalizability of the findings.

Keywords

• prediction
• recurrent neural network
• cyclist speed
• urban area