 Hello everyone and welcome to episode seven of Cycling Research Review and this week's question, how can cycling and transit work together to provide an alternative to driving over longer distances? This week we'll review a paper by Cogger and Harms who talk extensively about how cycling and transit can be conceptualized. Now there's been many academic articles about the engineering details and how cycling and transit can be better done such as implementing bike racks, building better infrastructure, but this is the first piece of work that I've seen that actually visually illustrates how cycling and transit can then affect the urban environment and how the cities can also be designed. So today we kind of start with this question is how cycling and transit have their distinct advantages and also disadvantages. So for cycling the advantage is that it's completely human-powered, it's quite a bit faster than walking and while being on the move you have some exercise, but on the disadvantage side is the obvious limit of its range combined with the speed meaning that it's not so practical for distances over five kilometers let's say. On the other hand if you want a very high speed transit system then what you want is stop spacing that's further apart because the more you have to stop your trains to serve stations then the slower the average speed will be. What you want is larger stations that are further apart to move high volume of people at a very high speeds without stopping. Therein it creates a conflict because on the other hand you also want transit that comes to your front door ideally and you can't really combine the two. Jared Walker in his book Human Transit talks about how transit operators deal with these issues and how transit planners then try to fit these issues around urban planning aspects. So I write while cycling is incredibly efficient mode of transport the range is limited. Long-distance public transport is also quite efficient compared to the automobile and it operates at a much higher speed however these speedy services probably don't come to your front door and Roland Cogger and Lucas Harms in this paper then argues well how do we combine the best of both worlds? How can we develop a public transit system that in effect comes to your front door by speeding up the access mode which means incorporating cycling into the mix. They offer some more suggestions about how exactly in detail and practice how this can be implemented such as bike parking and infrastructure and also social and behavior change but we'll skip over that part because I want to get straight to their conceptualizations which I think is the most interesting bit. The solution may be thinking about Dutch cycling as vehicles for providing a single tightly integrated journey and that's what they're trying to conceptualize. I live in the Netherlands and I think not out of conscious effort but more out of accident and historical development the cycling and trains have become quite tightly integrated here and that's not the case in most other places so they use a case study to see what kind of lessons can be learned from the Dutch system. I'll first take a quote from them. Their paper investigates quote a transport system that is scalable to cater for urban mobility needs while being sustainable and compatible with attractive streets and public space. It is the combination of the two opposite yet synergistic transport modes a rapid mass transit for efficient and concentrated travel floats in the long hauls so longer stop spacing and walking and cycling for the flexible movement of diffuse and short floats over very short distances. Both these modes so public transit and cycling and walking are scalable and don't impair high quality public space yet these modes on their own only serve highly distinct and partial travel segments. The integration of both modes should aim to tightly connect the strengths of each mode speed and efficiency on long distances for transit versus speed and flexibility on short distances for cycling with the opposite weaknesses of the other mode so we just talked about the intrinsic door-to-door accessibility of transit versus the limited action radius of cycling so the intrinsic low door-to-door accessibility of transit. An area with good cycling transit integration is one where cycling acts as a natural part of the transit system offering a solution to the limited door-to-door connectivity the problem of transit and equally transit acts as a natural extension of the cycling system offering a solution to the action radius problem. That's a quote from Cogger and Harms. Read the paper if you want to see the whole thing on page six. So let's jump straight to section two of this paper because it's about 30 pages so I'm just going to cover one section which I think is a key section today and they outline seven mechanisms on how cycling transit integration can improve accessibility and also improve the urban environment so they're linking transport to the land use aspects. I'll list these seven. One, increased catchment areas. Two, increased choice including station choice. Three, increased personalization and customization of transit journeys. Four, an increased market-based for rapid transit system with more widely spaced stops. Five, an increased competitiveness of transit cycling and cities. Six, increased liveliness of public space and seven, increased agglomeration effects. I'll then now go over each of these mechanisms separately. You can follow along on the figures that will be on the website so if you scroll down there. So the first mechanism the mechanism of increased catchment areas. Now I find this particularly fascinating because really simple geometric math between the relationship between the radius of a circle which we'll call the catchment area of a transit station versus the area that you can cover. So if you have an evenly distributed circle so with houses evenly distributed in the whole area not true in practice but let's say that was the case then if you can cover three times the distance which means three times the radius from the transit station then in the same time you can get access to nine times more area. So that's the fundamental math is that if you can cycle three times faster than you can walk then mathematically you will be able to access nine times the area. And nine times the area is very good for transit service providers because that means nine times the amount of potential passengers with minimal impact on the land use around the station. You have to provide some bike parking but it is much lower impact than having either a large parking lot for parking ride commuters or developing new and elaborate transit systems to feed this station. We can imagine from that then derive well if we instead of imagining 15 kilometers an hour as a human power bicycle we then move to the realm of e-bikes or speed peddlex doing 25-45 kilometers an hour then you can really vastly and quite drastically increase the catchment area with speed. So you get you get a quadratic function. And number two we'll go on to number two the mechanism of increased choice. So if you live in a big urban area then it is likely that there is more than one train station and sometimes you'll have a north station, a south station, a central station, a east station, a west station. And the train services departing from these stations are not always the same services. So for example in Amsterdam if I depart from central station I could get mostly everywhere but to get to other places and if I live close to another station that has limited services a smaller outlying station then I might want to forego that transfer and just bike straight to the further central station. If I want to go say one station further by bike and cut down my train time then I also have that option. Which leads us to the next point is the mechanism of increased customization. Whereas point number two, figure two is just about station access. Figure three then talks about okay what about the services that you need to access. So it's not just about traveling simply from A to B home to work but also about going to the grocery store picking up your kids. And there are probably quite a few people that take different routes between the morning commute and their afternoon commute. So that's something really interesting to think about. Number four the mechanism of increased market base for rapid transit systems. I think this one's quite important for the transit operator side of the equation being that if you can increase your market base then you can offer more frequent services. So if you can fill up a train faster then you're more likely to upgrade the quality of that service and also to upgrade the speed of that service. So we want to move ideally towards faster service that brings more people on a single line and if you were able to concentrate all the passengers to one place then transit providers will be able to do that more effectively. So and that means by bringing in more people within the catchment area of the station then we also bring in more opportunities for rapid transit in place of more local slower services. Number five the mechanism of increased competitiveness of transit cycling and cities. So here this point is really about feedback mechanisms and the paper makes the argument and the analogy to an airport. Why do people pay so much to park around the airport and pay so much to get to the airport and why is airport land so valuable even though there is nowhere to go and the clear answer for airports is that it offers connections to other places. So one can imagine the same mechanism happening for cities in that the connection value of larger more agglomerated transit stations can then lead to even more attractiveness for people who want to travel other places and those people then choose to live in the city and so on and cycling can really speed up this feedback loop and add to it because then instead of a radius of let's say one kilometer that can access the station now you have five kilometers within the same travel distance. So now you have a bigger catchment area of people more people want to use this intercity station and that that leads to then more services being offered at the station and services that go further and faster so the station that becomes more attractive for more people and so on and so on the station gets bigger and and then you have this effect where the more concentrated the travel activities are then this also gives value to the people who live there. So that feeds into the land use effects land becomes more valuable and then this feedback loop continues which leads to number six with the mechanism of increased liveliness of public space. People traveling to train stations by bike or by foot participate in the activities of public space unlike motorized vehicle users so people who are coming to the station by bus they don't really add to the liveliness of the space around the station right they're not stopping to go shopping they're not stopping on their bike to meet their friends they're just heading from the train into a bus and onwards they're go and same with people who drive to the station they park their car and they get on the train whereas if you have these more open modes walking and cycling there's more of an opportunity to to stop and have a chat or to go visit the grocery store and really enliven the public space around the station. Number seven covers a mechanism of land use change that supports agglomeration effects so this talks about how unlike the automobile which forces dispersion in a city which low density and parking are the dominant motives for automobile development the the land use that the cycling and train mechanism brings about is more concentration because people are attracted to these larger long-distance stations and they will choose to move there so once they choose to move to there then we have subcentres developing around these stations and once you have subcentres developing around these stations then people are much more concentrated around where city centers have train services or rapid transit services so that leads to this polycentric structure where we have natural gravitation towards train stations and rapid transit stations and and then the hinterlands so it kind of looks like the the transit cities that were built you know early 20th century before the automobile really took over it's pockets of walkable neighborhoods along a linear tram line. Cougar and Harms then compares this to the automobile mechanism which aims at dispersal and the difference in that is that cars once they get off the highway they still have to get to the final destination so congestion on local roads is a real bottleneck for automobile use and and travel time doesn't increase linearly with distance on the other hand train travel has the advantage of being most direct and fastest between city centers the biggest train stations are usually where most of the people are so you get dropped off at the places of largest concentration and there's no getting off the highway getting onto a local road and then getting onto an access street the hierarchy of roads doesn't apply to this in the same way to train logic. What the train logic is you have a connecting feeder mode so cycling walk and transit you get to your train station and then it's a direct A to B travel. Then Cougar and Harms goes on to talk about the Dutch case study and here there are some very interesting facts in the Netherlands most of you probably will know that 27-28% depending on the figures you're looking at of all trips are made by the bicycle but that it is well less known that 5% of all trips are made by train. It seems that the number of train trips is insignificant at first glance but these numbers are equalized when we look at kilometers traveled. Now this 27-28% of cycling trips are done over short distances whereas train trips are are much longer so let's look at the kilometers traveled. There it's 10% of all kilometers traveled are done by bikes much less than the trip share and 12% by train so even though less trips happen by train people travel more kilometers by train and that's important because if we're looking at let's say sustainable transportation then that means you're replacing a longer leg of a potential automobile trip potentially. Cycling access brings express public transport within 20-minute reach of 46% of the Dutch population. Now only 10% live within a walking range so if we take walking 20-minute walking as let's say 1.25 kilometers and 20-minute cycling as 5 kilometers then already without changing the transit train system without adding any extra stops just by changing the access mode we can reconceptualize the coverage of transit access to be a wow that's like four or five times more than compared to if we had only walking as an option and from the traveler's perspective I think the mechanism of increased choice in addition to this increased catchment area is the most overlooked aspect the ability especially if you bring your trip mode with you so if you're on a folding bike and you bring it with you on the train you can choose a different origin and destination station depending on where you need to be from that day. Cycling as an access mode also provides good financial and service incentives for transit providers if you can concentrate more people at a single station then you're also able to run more services to the station higher higher speed services and also I think with more people you can provide shops and better cycling amenities and and just make the whole environment of higher quality. Most important I think the greatest benefit from we'll leave it from here I think the greatest benefit from cycling transit integration is creating a more lively and attractive public spaces by increasing the flows of pedestrians and cyclists. Cogger and Harmsen writes in contrast an unlike car-based accessibility cycling and transit mobility steers away from the disruptive sprawl forces that work against the generation of glomeration and they work towards to concentrate the agglomeration effects which lead to more urban centers more concentrated small towns. They conclude with a call to action and they conclude with a call to action they state quote the available list of flexible and scalable mobility strategies for urban agglomerations is not a long one while the quest for sustainable effective and efficient urban mobility is pressing. The Dutch case and initial developments elsewhere shows that improved urban transit cycling integration can deliver effective and efficient urban mobility whilst not just being compatible with urban agglomeration economies but actually symbolically feeding such economies. So is cycling and transit a true competitor to the automobile? So what are my thoughts on the future of cycling transit integration? I think there's great potential here and I think it is indeed a one of the few solutions that we have for longer and medium distances travel that is a viable competitor to the automobile. In terms of the operational side I think trained operators would benefit greatly from having more people be able to access their services. The trained operators and transit operators will be able to provide vastly improved services on existing corridors and cities that are fortunate enough to have a operational train system can then leverage the bicycle as a way to upgrade their existing services. From the consumer standpoint or from the travel experience standpoint it is by far my favorite way to travel. I think taking the train is by far much more comfortable than any other form of public transit and definitely much more comfortable than the bus and if you have airline style seating you can enjoy a cup of coffee, flip down the table and really use this travel time as work time. So I hope that this video has really helped you conceptualized what the cycling and train system really means on a city level. If you want to know more about the transit side I encourage you to read Jared Walker's book Human Transit and that covers everything about stop spacing and express versus local bus travel. He goes and gives a really knowledgeable, in-depth guide and digestible guide to how the whole transit operation side of things work. I think bicycle planners should also get some of that knowledge to be able to work effectively with transit agencies to make a cycling transit integration system happen. Now I hope you enjoyed this video. I really enjoyed reading this paper so I encourage it is 30 pages. I encourage you to read the whole thing. The link is in the description below. It is open access and also in the description below is my summary of the paper. If you're interested in hearing more about cycling research I release videos and summaries every Tuesday and I'm also on Twitter at Cycling Research Review, LinkedIn, Facebook as well so give that a Google. 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