Bicycle Mobility Data: Current Use and Future Potential. An International Survey of Domain Professionals

Abstract

Active mobility, especially cycling, is an essential building block for sustainable urban mobility. Public and private stakeholders are striving to improve conditions for cycling and subsequently increase its modal share. Data are regarded as key for different measures to become efficient and targeted. There is extensive evidence for an increasing amount of mobility data, availability of new data sources and potential usage scenarios for such data. However, little is known about the current use of these data in policy making, planning and related fields. To the best of our knowledge, it has not been investigated yet to which degree professionals in the broader field of cycling promotion benefit from an increasing amount of cycling-related data. Thus, we conducted a multi-lingual online survey among domain professionals and acquired data on their perspectives on current data availability, use and suitability as well as the potential they see for the use of cycling data in the future. In total, we received 325 complete responses from 32 countries, with the vast majority of 241 valid responses originating from Germany, Austria and Italy. Key findings are: 84% of domain professionals attribute high importance to data, and 89% state that they currently cannot or only partly solve their tasks with the data available to them. Results emphasize the need for making more and better suited data available to professionals in cycling-related positions, in both the private and public sector.

Keywords

• cycling data
• active mobility
• data availability
• bicycle mobility
• big data
• bike share