Bike lanes work, PSU professor says

Researcher straps GPS devices on bikes to study riding patterns

By Jim Redden

Pamplin Media Group, Oct 16, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (8 Reader comments)

L.E. BASKOW / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

PSU associate professor Jennifer Dill has researched how bicyclists travel around town. She used GPS devices to track 164 riders’ bike trips over seven days.

Despite the harrumphing of talk-radio hosts and the carping of car chauvinists, bike lanes do, in fact, work — and Portland State University researcher Jennifer Dill thinks she can prove it.

A year after strapping Global Positioning System recorders on hundreds of local bicyclists, Dill thinks she has enough data to demonstrate that “bike infrastructure” such as bike lanes, bike routes, and so on really do encourage people to get out of their cars and steer bikes away from busy thoroughfares that aren’t designed to accommodate them.

Dill recruited 164 bicyclists to carry GPS recorders on their bike trips for seven days. Altogether, they took 1,777 trips between April and November of 2007.

Dill then used the GPS information to track their trips and determine whether they were taking the shortest routes or intentionally choosing longer ones.

Remarkably, the results showed that although only 8 percent of city streets are equipped with any kind of bike infrastructure, 51 percent of trips were taken on them. To Dill, this means that most riders are seeking out such routes, even if they are not the shortest.

“People are going out of their way to use bike infrastructure,” Dill said.

Roger Geller, the city’s bicycle coordinator with the Portland Office of Transportation, is excited by Dill’s findings.

“Basically it confirms the story we have been telling — if you build it, they will use it,” he said.

Women see danger, men plow on

As she was sifting through her research data, Dill was surprised to discover that she was the kind of person most likely to hop on a bike if the infrastructure were better.

“I’m a woman over 40 who would ride more if I felt the routes were safe,” said Dill, an associate professor of urban studies and planning at PSU’s College of Urban and Public Affairs.

According to Dill, most regular bicyclists are young men. This means that if the city wants to substantially increase the number of people riding bikes on a regular basis, it needs to reach out to young women and older people. And, Dill said, that is what public spending on bike infrastrcture can accomplish, as she herself demonstrates.

“When I was in my 20s, I used to ride bicycles all the time and didn’t really think much about whether it was safe,” said Dill, who has taught courses on transportation, land use and planning policies at PSU for seven years.

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