Promoting active transportation : a comparative assessment of paths and prices

The time people spend traveling has far reaching implications for their health and for environmental outcomes. Urban planning paradigms – such as that of the “15-minute city” – have consequently endeavoured to bring key services and amenities to residents within a walkable or cycleable 15-20-minute distance. These efforts notwithstanding, the policy levers that influence travel-related time allocation remain poorly understood. Drawing on a panel of household travel data from Germany covering 2005 to 2020, the present study analyses the role of two such levers – bicycle/pedestrian paths and fuel prices – as determinants of time allocation across modes. We start with a descriptive analysis that identifies a stable average travel time expenditure ranging between 65 – 70 minutes for women and 75 – 80 minutes for men until 2020, when it dropped precipitously as COVID-19 spread. We subsequently estimate fractional response models to identify the influence of the policy variables on time expenditures across motorized, nonmotorized, and public transit modes. We complete the analysis by feeding the model estimates into the World Heath Organization’s on-line Health and Economic Assessment Tool (HEAT) to quantify the health and environmental impacts of the planned expansion of the bike path network in the city of Munich, comparing this with the impact of Germany’s recently introduced carbon tax on fuel. Both measures yield substantial benefits, with the implementation of the tax yielding a considerably higher benefit/cost ratio owing to its lower cost of implementation.