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Weather or Not to Cycle: Temporal Trends and Impact of Weather on Cycling in an Urban Environment (Canada)

This research report was published in the journal Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board in December 2011.This study investigated the relationship between weather conditions and cycling ridership, as well as the hourly, daily, monthly, and yearly trends for use of urban bicycle facilities. Precipitation, temperature, and humidity had significant effects on bicycle ridership.

A unique data set of cyclist ridership, collected at five automatic counting stations on primarily utilitarian bike facilities in the city of Montreal, Canada, was used. Absolute and relative ridership models were used to analyze the direct and lagging effects of weather variables and extreme weather conditions on hourly cyclist volumes.

Precipitation, temperature, and humidity had significant effects on bicycle ridership.

After other factors were controlled for, when the temperature doubled, a 43% to 50% increase in ridership could be expected; however, the temperature had a negative effect when it was higher than 28°C and humidity was greater than 60%. T

he results also showed that bicycle volumes in a given hour were significantly affected not only by the presence of rain in the same hour but also by the presence of rain in the previous 3 h or in the morning only.

Daily bicycle volumes were 65% to 89% lower on weekend days than on Monday, the weekday with lowest ridership. This finding confirmed that the analyzed facilities were primarily utilitarian. Further, bicycle volumes peaked in the summer months, with an additional ridership of 32% to 39% with respect to April.

Finally, bicycle volumes increased by approximately 20% to 27% in 2009 and 35% to 40% in 2010 with respect to 2008 in the cycling facilities under analysis.

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