Measuring low-stress connectivity in terms of bike-accessible jobs and potential bike-to-work trips: A case study evaluating alternative bike route alignments in northern Delaware

Abstract

When road segments with high traffic stress are excluded, the remaining network of low-stress roads and trails can be fragmented, lacking connections between many origin-destination pairs or requiring onerous detour. Low-stress connectivity is a measure of the degree to which origins (for this study, homes) and destinations (jobs) can be connected using only low-stress links and without excessive detour. Revision 2.0 to Level of Traffic Stress criteria is introduced and applied to the road and trail network of northern Delaware. A propensity model is proposed to reflect people’s declining willingness to ride a bike with greater trip length and detour, accounting for the impact to health and other benefits of cycling. New connectivity measures are introduced that can be interpreted as the number of bike-accessible jobs and the potential number of bike-to-work trips, powerful measures for evaluating alternatives. These connectivity measures are applied in a case study evaluating alternative alignments for a bike route between Wilmington and Newark, Delaware’s two largest cities, separated by a distance of about 20 km through a largely suburban landscape. The case study explores the benefits of enhancing alternatives with branches that help connect to population and employment centers. We also find that the connectivity gain from constructing multiple alignments is greater than the sum of connectivity gains from individual alignments, indicating that complementarity between the alternatives, which are spaced roughly 5 km apart, overshadows any competition between them.