Cycling in a Crisis: Employing Quasi-Experimental Designs to Estimate the Effects of Provisional Bicycle Infrastructure

During the Covid-19 pandemic, provisional infrastructure was implemented to support active transportation. However, the planning community still requires deeper understandings of the relationships between provisional infrastructure and mobility. We use the example of a roadway closure in Philadelphia to investigate how one active mode—bikeshare use—changed in response to provisional infrastructure. We employ differences-in-differences models that measure the semi-causal effect of provisional infrastructure on bikeshare trip durations and find that even during the pandemic, when trip durations increased across the bikeshare system, provisional infrastructure had an additive and statistically discernible impact above and beyond the pandemic effect.