Assessing the quality of walking and cycling infrastructure: A preference-based study

Albahlal, Fahad Saud 2025. Assessing the quality of walking and cycling infrastructure: A preference-based study. PhD Thesis, Cardiff. Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

The built environment significantly influences individuals’ propensity to walk and bicycle, and local authorities increasingly invest financial resources towards their development. Organisations managing the built environment have developed auditing tools as guidelines to inspect routes and identify improvements to support active travel. This study used several auditing tools to develop 21 walking and 25 cycling investment-relevant factors embedded into two choice-based survey instruments focusing on walking and cycling, respectively. The study aims to internally validate a preference-based elicitation approach known as Best-Worst Scaling (BWS) aimed to capture pedestrian and cyclist preferences. The BWS method offers many advantages over other methods (ranking, rating) as it involves a lower cognitive burden for respondents and provides a theoretically robust method to elicit preferences. Preferences directly translate into investment priorities aimed at increasing the rates of walking and cycling. As part of a survey instrument, these experiments will help obtain a ranking (preference) order of the highest and lowest priority factors likely to encourage people to walk and cycle on a standard scale. The relative importance of the walking and cycling factors was assessed in a UK representative sample of 364 pedestrians and 367 cyclists, respectively. In the walking experiment, footpath provision, footpath condition, lighting, footpath width and buffer zone were the top-5 highest priority factors. In the cycling experiment, dedicated pathways, pathway width, conflict with the heavy good vehicles, conflict at junctions and surface quality were the highest priority factors. This study demonstrates the validity of BWS experiments to provide a comparative analysis of walking and cycling factors.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Date Type:	Completion
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Geography and Planning (GEOPL)
Subjects:	G Geography. Anthropology. Recreation > G Geography (General)
Uncontrolled Keywords:	Active travel, Walking infrastructure investment, Cycling infrastructure investment, Best-worst scaling, Cognitive interview, Auditing tool, Pedestrian level of service, Cycling level of service, Pedestrian, Cyclist
Funders:	Saudi Ministry of Interior, King Fahad Security College and Saudi Embassy and Cultural Bureau in London f
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	17 December 2024
Last Modified:	17 Dec 2024 09:44
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/174761

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