Paper Details

TRB 91st Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Event Number:	539
Event Title:	Bicycle Planning and the Built Environment
Event Date:	Jan 24 2012 10:45AM- 12:30PM
Event Location:	Hilton, International Center
Event Description:
Event Agenda:

Factors Influencing Commute Bicycling by University Employees (12-0700)

The environmental, economic, and health benefits of bicycling provide motivation for policy makers to promote bicycling as a means of transportation. Research has linked socio-demographic factors, individual attitudes, and characteristics of the social and physical environments to the decision to bicycle. The purpose of this study is to identify and estimate the effects of significant individual and socio-demographic factors in university employees’ decisions to bicycle to work in the context of a bicycle-friendly social and physical environment with historically high bicycling rates. Results of binary logistic regression using data from an annual campus travel survey at the University of California at Davis indicate that among university employees, individual attitudes and preferences are key determinants of bicycling, whereas socio-demographic factors such as age, income, and gender are not found to have direct effects on bicycling. Since many studies have found gender to significantly influence bicycling behavior, gender-specific models are developed and several significant interaction effects are identified in the final model. Having a graduate degree and rating parking costs as important are found to have positive effects on bicycling among females, whereas rating travel costs as important is found to have positive effects among males. For both genders, bicycling comfort and liking biking increase the likelihood of commuting by bicycle, while general need for a car, need for a vehicle for work activities, liking driving, and rating travel convenience as important are found to decrease the likelihood of bicycling.

Authors
     Miller, Joshua Daniel, University of California, Davis
     Handy, Susan L., University of California, Davis