What Makes You Cycle this Far? An Analysis of Mandatory Bicycle Tour Distances

Bicycling is widely regarded to be a sustainable transport mode. Therefore, policy makers and planners seek to promote bicycling for utilitarian purposes such as commuting and other mandatory activities. The literature has considered numerous potential determinants of utilitarian bicycling, but remains inconclusive about the role of individual factors. Nonetheless, the majority of studies agree that travel distance is a key factor affecting utilitarian bicycling use. This study seeks to advance the understanding of the behavioural determinants of utilitarian bicycle use by analysing distances of home-based mandatory bicycle tours in the Netherlands. We posit that bicycle travel distances are proxies of cycling willingness and apply the principle of hedonic regression to the analysis of bicycling behaviour. Using household travel survey data from the Netherlands, we estimate hierarchical Bayesian generalised linear models to regress distances of i) work and educational tours and ii) other mandatory tours on tour attributes and socio-demographic characteristics. The hierarchical Bayesian approach allows for the flexible estimation of random effects to capture similarities of observations within individuals and households. Tour distances are found to systematically vary as a function of tour attributes and socio-demographic characteristics. Furthermore, the results indicate the presence of household interaction effects. All else being equal, electric bicycle use is found to increase distances of work and educational tours by 68% and distances of other mandatory tours by 39%. Our study underlines that electric bicycles may facilitate sustainable mobility for utilitarian purposes