When cycle paths are not enough: Seville’s bicycle-PT project

Abstract

The city of Seville (Spain) has been named the fourth most “bicycle-friendly city” in the world, mainly due to the building of a segregated network of bicycle paths which, in a few years, substantially increased utilitarian cycling in the city. However, recent bicycle counts along the network have shown that the volume of cycling is now levelling off at around 6% of the city’s mobility (9% of all mechanised trips); a meaningful level but still far from the figures that are usual in leading cycling cities. This stagnation suggests that new actions are needed in order to further develop urban cycling and overcome bottlenecks that prevent its growth, perhaps by integrating cycling policies into wider sustainable mobility and traffic calming policies. Among these actions, improving links between bicycles and public transport (PT) could play a significant role. This is the subject of the Bicycle-PT research project that is currently being developed by the authors at the University of Seville and founded by the Regional Government. The main aim of this project is to diagnose present links and to evaluate the potential market for bicycle-PT intermodality in the entire metropolitan area, as well as to make specific proposals for its development. For this purpose, the authors use a geographic information system (GIS) based methodology, combined with information provided by mobility and opinion surveys.