Accommodating Bicycle Traffic on Rural Two-Lane Highways: An Empirical Approach

The concept of the level of traffic stress (LTS) is increasingly being used to assess how suitable the infrastructure is for different cyclist types. These studies typically relied on literature reviews and expert opinions to develop lookup tables, with most prior research concentrated on urban regions—only a handful set of guidelines proposed LTS-based criteria for rural highways relying on expert opinion. This research aims to develop and validate a method to derive bicycle LTS criteria for rural contexts based on empirical data. With increasing cycling demand on rural highways, it becomes important to define when riding is not suitable for different cyclist types. Operational preferences for rural cycling of 982 individuals in the US were collected using an online survey. Individuals selected which cycling conditions they felt better served their needs as bicyclists from vignette experiments. We derived individual parameters for each attribute to predict each individual’s propensity to cycle, as self-stated cyclist types (e.g., enthused and confident) failed to capture systematic variability. Using the distributions, we propose a robust framework for developing LTS criteria for bicycling in rural networks considering user preferences.