The impact of bicycles on journey planning

Using a bicycle as pre-transport for public transport significantly changes travel patterns. Still journey planners are not able to cope with this combination of modalities. Moreover, one of the Netherlands largest journey planning apps “9292” stated that customers are not interested in journey plans with the option to use bicycle in their journey.

The Urban-Engine was used to draw insights on this matter and it was found that for the traveller it is impossible to take an informed decision on the way to travel as it is nearly impossible to evaluate all the different alternatives.

The analysis used to compare journey plans using public transport and journey plans with public transport where a bicycle is used as pre-transport. The city of Amsterdam is divided in regions of 100m by 100m and for each grid journey plans are requested towards Amersfoort station. This is done for every 15 minutes between 07:00 and 08:00 as departure time. It is assumed that the pre-transport on bicycle is a maximum of 20 minutes. The study shows that 41% of the journey plans would have a different departing railway station and the average time saving on the journey is 19%. The map indicates in orange which grid locations have changed their departing station.

We believe that using a personalized journey plan including bicycle as modality will improve the complete end-to-end journey of the traveler.