Modeling bicyclists' destination location choice: Spatial-temporal constraint for choice set generation

With growing environmental concerns and increased awareness about physical fitness, many people are shifting their travel mode to bike for various activities. Hence, understanding bike users' destination choice behavior is crucial for developing policies and making infrastructure investment decisions. This study develops a mixed logit model with panel effect to analyze destination location choice for bike user’ home-based tours. The study adopts time-space prism concept to generate activity-specific choice sets, accommodating spatial, temporal, and physical strength constraints. The model is estimated using travel survey data from the Okanagan region of British Columbia. It has been tested for different sizes of choice sets, and goodness-of-fit measures have been compared to identify the model that best fits the data. The results suggest that tour-related attributes, individual characteristics, work profiles, built environment characteristics, and transportation infrastructure-related variables significantly influence destination choices. For example, bike users prefer destinations closer to home. However, variation exists based on tour types. For simple tours with one destination, bike user may travel longer distances, whereas for complex tours with multiple destinations, they may prefer shorter distances for each leg of the tour. Telecommuters may travel longer distances, while commuters show significant variability in their destination choices – some prefer traveling shorter distances while others travel farther. Important policy variables include a higher density of activity destinations, bike lane to road length ratio, and bike index, which may attract more biker users. The findings of this study will facilitate in developing travel demand models sensitive to bike users' travel behavior.