Transportation Research Part A 155 (2022) 434–449

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Transportation Research Part A

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/tra

What makes bicyclists comfortable? Insights from a visual

preference survey of casual and prospective bicyclists
Dillon T. Fitch a, *, Jane Carlen b, Susan L. Handy a
a
Institute of Transportation Studies, 1 Shields Avenue, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, United States.
b
Los Angeles Times, 2300 E. Imperial Highway, El Segundo, CA 90245, United States

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Understanding what environments are comfortable (and perceived as safe) for bicyclists is
Bicycling essential for increasing bicycling, particularly for non-experienced riders. Surveys probing peo­
Perceived safety ple’s qualitative perceptions about bicycling environments can inform bicycle planning in
Bicycling comfort
important ways. In this study we use survey data from an on-line video experiment to analyze
Built environment
Bike infrastructure
bicycling comfort and its relationship with person-level and road-level variables. We use an
existing survey of students, faculty, and staff at UC Davis (n = 3089) who rated video clips of
bicycling facilities in different environments based on their perceived comfort as a part of the
annual UC Davis Campus Travel Survey (CTS). The video clips come from a variety of urban and
semi-rural roads around the San Francisco Bay Area where bicycling rates vary. Our results
indicate considerable effects of socio-demographics and attitudes on absolute video ratings, but
we find relative agreement about which videos are most comfortable and uncomfortable across
our sample population segments. Presence of bike infrastructure and low speed roads are espe­
cially important in generating higher comfort ratings. However, our results suggest that even the
best designed on-road bike facilities (according to attributes in our data) are unlikely to provide a
comfortable bicycling environment for those without a predisposition to bicycle. Nonetheless, our
results provide guidance for improving roads with on-street bike facilities where protected or
separated facilities may not be suitable. We discuss these results in the context of design standards
for bicycling and methods for prioritizing bike infrastructure investments.

1. Introduction and background

Cities across the globe are turning to bicycling as a mode of travel to combat numerous negative societal impacts from car-oriented
lifestyles including climate change, air quality, and obesity. While the factors that contribute to bicycling as a normal mode of travel in
cities are numerous and interact in complex ways, the primary way cities encourage a transition to bicycling is through redesigning
transportation infrastructure. Not only is this intervention clearly under the control of local and regional governments, but it is likely to
be one of the most important interventions to support bicycling because a safe and comfortable environment is a necessary condition
for bicycling to occur (Fowler et al., 2017; Handy et al., 2002; Sallis et al., 2013). Indeed, safety and comfort along with distance are
some of the strongest factors discouraging bicycling (Dill, 2009; Fowler et al., 2017; Heinen et al., 2010; Xing et al., 2010).
While researchers have made some effort to distinguish between perceived safety and comfort for bicycling (Clark et al., 2021; Lee,

* Corresponding author at: Institute of Transportation Studies, 1 Shields Avenue, University of California at Davis, Davis, CA 95616, United States.
E-mail addresses: dtfitch@ucdavis.edu (D.T. Fitch), jcarlen@ucla.edu (J. Carlen), slhandy@ucdavis.edu (S.L. Handy).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2021.11.008
Received 26 April 2021; Received in revised form 15 September 2021; Accepted 6 November 2021
Available online 13 December 2021
0965-8564/© 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd. This is an open access article under the CC BY license
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
D.T. Fitch et al. Transportation Research Part A 155 (2022) 434–449

2020), most studies conflate the two concepts because they are strongly correlated (i.e. feeling safe implies a feeling of comfort, and
vice versa). Perceptions of safety and comfort have been important predictors of bicycling behavior and have been measured through a
variety of techniques. Questionnaires are the most direct way to measure perceptions of safety and comfort, usually through ordered
categorical responses to textual statements, images, videos, or even virtual reality experiments (Fitch and Handy, 2017). Other
techniques include inferring perceptions of safety and comfort from bicycling behavior (either stated design preferences or observed
route choices), although often the goal is the reverse, to use perceptions of safety and comfort to predict bicycling behavior. Lastly,
some attempts have been made to measure comfort more objectively through human physiological responses (Doorley et al., 2015;
Fitch et al., 2020b; Teixeira et al., 2020), although those techniques have yet to be validated.
Providing environments perceived to be safe for an entire population is challenging because individuals differ as to the type of
environments in which they feel safe and comfortable. Research shows, for example, that women and men differ significantly in their
comfort with and perceptions of safety for the same environments (Garrard et al., 2012). Furthermore, evidence suggests that bike
infrastructure and other road environment variables can influence perceived safety and comfort for different groups of people in
different ways (Clark et al., 2021; Griswold et al., 2018). Nonetheless, most bike infrastructure and road environment variables have
the same direction of effect across the population such that:

(1) Greater vehicular volume and speed are usually associated with less perceived safety and comfort (Buehler and Dill, 2016;
Epperson, 1994; Landis et al., 1997).
(2) Greater bike operating space is associated with greater perceived safety and comfort (Buehler and Dill, 2016; Landis et al., 1997)
(3) Bike infrastructure is strongly associated with perceptions of safety and comfort with the strength of association varying based
on infrastructure type (e.g. sharrows the weakest and multi-use paths the strongest) (Buehler and Dill, 2016; Clark et al., 2021;
Dill et al., 2015; Monsere et al., 2014)

Although evidence overwhelmingly indicates protected and separate infrastructure for bicycling is the best way to increase
perceived comfort and safety (Dill et al., 2015; Harris et al., 2013; Monsere et al., 2014; Teschke et al., 2012; Winters et al., 2013),
cities often find it difficult to provide these types of facilities due to their higher costs, political opposition, and the challenge of
integrating them into existing transportation networks. For this reason, on-road bike infrastructure such as mixed travel lanes and bike
lanes remain important in the effort to increase bicycling, and planners face the challenge of making such facilities feel safe and
comfortable despite the limited protection from traffic they provide.
Beyond the challenge of supporting bicycling with on-road facilities, bike research and planning (especially in the U.S.) has often
focused on the need to satisfy different types of bicyclists. This idea was likely born out of the recognition that bicycle planning in the
U.S. focused only on recreational cyclists and advocates for ‘vehicular’ cycling up until the 2000s (Epperson, 2014). While a history of
classifying bicyclists existed prior to the 2000s, the classes defined by Roger Geller in 2006, based on the idea that a universal
‘vehicular’ design could not satisfy all prospective bicyclists, became the common classes used in U.S. bike planning (Dill and McNeil,
2016, 2013). Further attempts to classify current and prospective bicyclists cemented the idea that building infrastructure to support
bicycling as a normal mode of travel should consider the differences between classes of bicyclists (Clark et al., 2021; Damant-Sirois
et al., 2014; Dill and McNeil, 2013; Griswold et al., 2018). However, accommodating different needs in infrastructure design and
network planning has been logistically impossible in practice. Given limited funding, cities have focused on satisfying one class of
bicyclists, generally those classified as “interested but concerned” (Dill and McNeil, 2016), or those willing ride on “level of stress 1 or
2” (Mekuria et al., 2012).
The practice of focusing on one bicyclist type in planning is not only prudent but perhaps optimal for reducing the safety and
comfort barriers for bicycling by the masses. The need for multiple classes may not be necessary for design and planning, and it may
distract from the goal of increasing safety and bike mode share for entire populations. We shift from the concept of bicyclist types to a
“design person” (much like street design guides use design vehicles and design speeds) and focus on a “minimum infrastructure” for
making that person comfortable with the goal of increasing perceived safety and comfort for all. Using survey data from a video
experiment on bicycling comfort from different road environments, we examine individual and group differences in bicycling comfort
and the effects of different road characteristics on bicycling comfort. We use our results to identify the characteristics of a design
person, whom we define as the type of person in our sample who feels least comfortable bicycling in on-road facilities and identify the
minimum infrastructure attributes needed to provide a comfortable on-street bicycling experience for that design person.

2. Methods

2.1. Data collection

2.1.1. Survey
We administered the video survey as a part of the 2017 UC Davis Campus Travel Survey (CTS). The CTS is an annual survey of travel
to and from the university administered on-line to a stratified-random sample of faculty, staff, and students recruited through e-mail
and incentivized with raffles for forty $50 USD pre-paid debit cards and two tablet computers (Wei, 2018).
The UC Davis population is unique with respect to bicycling behavior in that the most common travel mode to campus is bicycle
(Lee, 2019), encouraged by a relatively safe bicycling environment and strong bicycling culture. Only 7% of bike commuting UC Davis
undergraduates biked to high school (authors’ own summary of data from Thigpen (2015)) suggesting that the majority of students
have limited experience with bicycling for transportation until arriving in Davis. The sample used in this study thus provides a useful

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Table 1
Experimental design.
Infrastructure Class Video name Within-Class treatments Between-Class treatments

Shared collector Virginia_ChestnutWestStPath X One random video

4th_AddisonUniversity X
4th_VirginiaDelaware X
Chabot_CollegePresley X
Skyline_SnakeManzanita X

Shared arterial SanPablo_GilmanHarrison X One random video

SanPablo_CedarVirginia X
Ashby_CaliforniaKing X
Ashby_DeakinTelegraph X
Ashby_ColbyRegent X

Bike lane adjacent to fast traffic or rural highway Tunnel_OakRidgeUplands X One random video
SanPabloDam_WildcatOldSanPabloDam X
Skyline_FortFunstonOlympic X
Hwy1_MartiniCreek X
GrizzlyPeak_SouthClaremont X

Bike lane adjacent to moderate speed traffic SanPabloDam_FireTrailNo3 X One random video
California_FranciscoDelaware X
Channing_DanaEllsworth X
Alcatraz_ColbyHillegass X
Broadway_GoldenGateLakeTemescal X

Buffered bike lane Tunnel_HillerVincente X One random video

Tunnel_VicenteBridge X
CaminoPablo_ElToyonal X
Miles_CollegeForest X
Sloat35_CreastlakeGabilan X

perspective on the link between infrastructure and bicycling comfort and perceived safety. Because many participants have experience
bicycling in Davis, they are more aware of, and have likely reflected on, the attributes of a road that make them comfortable, in
contrast to prospective bicyclists in other cities who have little or no experience bicycling for day-to-day travel. Bicyclists in the UC
Davis sample are also different from existing bicyclists in larger cities of the San Francisco Bay Area (where the videos were recorded)
in that the latter are more willing than most to bicycle in non-ideal environments (e.g., mixed traffic, high speed roads). The Davis
sample can thus yield insights into the likely comfort of prospective bicyclists living elsewhere had they had the opportunity to bicycle
afforded to those living in Davis.
From the overall CTS sample (n = 3089), 2903 people responded to the video sub-survey with each person providing up to five
ratings of comfort for a total number of 14,459 observations. Along with these responses to the video experiment, described below, we
measured many other variables in the main survey. These include main travel mode to campus, specific travel frequency by mode to
campus in the prior week, campus role (student/grad student/faculty/staff), age, gender, household structure, bicycling confidence,
bicycling comfort in a variety of environments (through textual descriptions), and some more specific travel attitudes. We measured
general bicycling confidence and comfort through textual descriptions. For the former, the survey asked those who could ride a bike to
select either I can ride a bike, but I’m not very confident doing so; I am somewhat confident riding a bike; or I am very confident riding a bike.
For bicycling comfort, the survey asked, “In general, how comfortable would you be riding a bicycling on a four-lane street (two
lanes in either direction) without a bicycle lane, in daylight and good weather?” Respondents were asked to select Uncomfortable
and I wouldn’t ride on it; Uncomfortable but I would ride on it; or Comfortable. All other travel attitudes we measured using five-level
ordered categorical responses from strongly disagree to strongly agree. For example, respondents selected how much they agreed
or disagreed with the statement “I like riding a bike”. We refer to the socio-demographic and attitudinal variables as person-level
variables in our analysis.

2.1.2. Experimental design

In designing the video survey to answer the above research questions, we chose 25 videos (each 10 s in length) based on recordings
taken from a variety of mostly urban arterials and some rural roads (all of which were designated California state highways) around the
San Francisco Bay Area from a prior study (Griswold et al., 2018). Owing to the purpose of this prior study, these videos represented
on-street facilities but not protected bike lanes or off-street bike or shared-use paths on California designated highways (urban and
rural). In the original study, the selection of roads was based on the goals of recording a wide variety of bicycle environments within
the convenience of a relatively short drive from UC Berkeley. The original videos were much longer in duration, and part of this study
included the cropping and selecting of sub-sections of video to present to reduce survey burden and reduce the variation in driver
behavior within and between each video (e.g., we avoided video segments in which cars crossed the bicycle facility). Like the original
study, this study selected videos with the widest possible range of environments while maintaining some degree of “within infra­
structure class” variety so as to create our experimental conditions (see below).
We consider each video a different bicycling infrastructure treatment level (creating a nominal predictor variable for the models

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Fig. 1. Example image of video survey with response categories.

described below). Each video is assigned to one of five bicycle infrastructure classes (shared arterial, shared collector road, bike lane
with high speeds, bike lane with moderate speeds, and buffered bike lane). To limit survey burden, we designed our survey to function
in two conditions, one in which participants see videos of very similar road environments with only subtle differences in road char­
acteristics (within-class treatments), and one in which participants see videos of very different road environments with extreme dif­
ferences in road characteristics (between-class treatments) (Table 1). This allowed us to examine whether participants’ comfort ratings
(explained below) depended on the degree of variation in the video clips they saw in the experiment. Our treatment assignment
procedure was as follows:

(1) Randomly assign a person to the within-class treatment or the between-class treatment, while maintaining an equal balance of
people in the two treatments.
(2) For within-class treatments, randomly assign one of five bicycle infrastructure classes (blocks). Do this while maintaining an
equal number of people in each of the five blocks. Then present the five videos of the block in random order.
(3) For between-class treatments, randomly assign one video from each of the five blocks and present them in random order. Do this
while maintaining equal numbers of people for each video.

Table 1 demonstrates how the procedure results in nearly balanced data collection across the two treatment types and infra­
structure classes. The video names in Table 1 are shorthand for the location of the video clip. For example, “4th_AddisonUniversity”
indicates the video comes from 4th St between Addison and University in Berkeley, CA.
To measure comfort with each environment, we asked the following of each participant:
“Next you will view 5 short video clips (10 s each). For each clip, imagine that you are bicycling in the environment shown and then rate
how comfortable you would feel”
Participants then viewed the video clip and responded based on a 7-point ordered response scale (see Fig. 1). We removed all audio
from the video clips. This reduced the realism somewhat because sound is often a good indicator of a soon to be passing vehicle.
However, because we could not control the participants’ audio because we lacked a controlled setting, we decided to exclude sound.

2.2. Video and infrastructure data

While the videos are themselves treated as variables in our analysis by treating video as a level in our multilevel models (see Section
2.2.3 below), the characteristics of the videos are also a primary focus. We focus on the following features of the videos (i.e., road-level
variables) that were collected in the field during video recording or after reviewing the videos from Griswold et al. (2018):

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Table 2
Description of models.

Model Interactions* elpd

elpd-loo (SE) (SE)
Name Person Road Environment diff.

Main
– – − 21526.9 (97.4) − 67.2 (11.0)
Effects
Interaction
Woman × − 21523.0 (98.3) − 63.3 (12.1)
1
uncomfortable but I would ride on it:
Interaction
four-lane street (two lanes in either × − 21522.8 (97.4) − 63.2 (10.8)
2
direction) without a bicycle lane
Interaction (street parking + outside lane width + vehicle
usual bike commuter × − 21520.9 (97.4) − 61.2 (12.2)
3 volume + bike operating space + speed limit + bike
Interaction lane type + (prevailing speed – speed limit) + zero
bicycling ability × − 21516.5 (97.6) − 56.9 (12.5)
4 bike operating space)
Comfortable: four-lane street (two
Interaction
lanes in either direction) without a × − 21495.4 (97.4) − 35.7 (11.2)
5
bicycle lane
Interaction
Age × − 21468.4 (97.5) − 8.7 (8.1)
6
Age × bike operating space + Age × speed limit 40–50 mph + Age × prevailing speed – speed limit +
Age × non-zero vehicle volume and no bike operating space + Comfortable: four-lane …× street
Final Model − 21459.7 (97.4) 0 (0.0)
parking + Comfortable: four-lane …× outside lane width + Comfortable: four-lane …× bike operating
space

* Each model was a multilevel ordinal logistic regression with all the parameters of the Main Effects model (see equation in Appendix A). The models
differed by their inclusion of the interactions presented. For example, Interaction 1 included all the main effects and interactions between Woman and
all road environment variables.

• Posted speed limit

• Presence of bike lane
• Presence of buffered bike lane
• Presence of street parking
• Prevailing car speed
• Bike lane width
• Bike lane and parking lane combined width
• Shoulder width
• Outside car lane width (lane closest to bike lane, shoulder, or curb)
• Car volume (three classes of numbers of passing vehicles)
• Presence of divided road
• Total bicycling operating space (sum of bike lane width, parking lane width, and shoulder width)

Prevailing car speed was measured by reviewing the videos and timing when cars passed screen lines of known distances. Car
volume was assigned as “None” (no moving cars in the same direction present), “Moderate” (at least one moving car present and no
more than 2 passing cars), “High” (more than 2 passing cars). We simplified car volume in this way because we did not have data on
average annual daily traffic for each roadway, and because a general measure of car volume would not be as connected to a partic­
ipant’s rating of bicycling comfort as the volume apparent in the video. All other road-level variables were measured in the field.

2.3. Analysis

2.3.1. Descriptive and bivariate relationships

We used exploratory data analysis to examine the relationships between all the variables and bicycling comfort. This included both
univariate and bivariate visualizations without formal tests of statistically significant differences. The exploratory analysis was pri­
marily used to determine problematic variables (highly correlated, too much missing data, etc.) and to guide the transformation of
variables for more formal statistical analyses.

2.3.2. Predictor variables

Our data contains measurements of 20 road-level variables and about twice as many person-level characteristics of the survey
respondents. About half of the person-level characteristics are attitudinal variables, as described above. The rest are demographic,
including one’s primary role at the university (e.g., Undergraduate Student, Staff), gender, age, and household composition. We
deleted cases with missing values after removing variables with a large percentage of missing data. The only exception was the variable
age, for which we imputed missing values. We also reduced the number of variables through a series of exploratory analyses (see
Appendix A for details about variable cleaning and selection). For easier model parameter interpretation (see below), we transformed
all variables to the 0–1 scale. We converted each categorical variable to a set of binary variables indicating the presence of a given

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Fig. 2. Sample characteristics in total counts of comfort responses.

level, excluding one reference level. For the 5-point ordered responses we coded {Strongly disagree, Somewhat disagree, Neither agree
nor disagree, Somewhat agree, Strongly agree} as {0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75, 1}. For numeric variables in units of distance we normalized
based on the minimum and maximum (e.g., [xi – min(x)]/[max(x) – min(x)]).

2.3.3. Statistical modeling

We used multilevel cumulative (ordinal) logistic regression models to analyze the bicycling comfort ratings (see Appendix A for
modeling details). This model type is most appropriate for the seven-level ordinal measure of comfort, the dependent variable in the
models, where repeated measures are made for each person and each video (making it multi-level data). The cumulative logistic
regression assumes all predictors have equal effect on each of the ordered response categories (known as the parallel slopes or pro­
portional odds assumption). This assumption is often reasonable for response variables with a hypothesized single underlying
continuous latent variable, in our case bicycling comfort. However, we also considered a model that retained the ordered nature of the
categories without this assumption (the adjacent categories model as described by Bürkner and Vuorre (2019)), but found the cu­
mulative model to greatly outperform that model in out-of-sample prediction (results not reported). In preliminary analyses of the
data, we reduced the number of predictor variables to consider and settled on the basic structure of the regression models (see Fitch
et al. (2020a) for detailed methods and results of these preliminary analyses). In this analysis, we consider two primary model forms, a
main effects model and an interaction model. The main effects model is used as a predictive baseline to determine the relative
improvement by considering a variety of interaction effects between personal characteristics and road environment variables. The
interaction effects models allow inferences about how person-level variables moderate the effects of road environments on bicycling
comfort, a key motivation of this study. We considered six interaction models and compared them to the main effects model. Each
interaction model included all the main effects plus the interaction of one person-level variable and all the road environment variables
(Table 2). We selected interaction effects from those six models based on predictive improvement and uncertainty of model parameters
and constructed a final model for all subsequent inferences (Final Model in Table 2). We used the expected log predictive density from
approximated leave-one-out cross validation (elpd-loo) (Vehtari et al., 2017) to measure relative predictive improvement (see
Table 2). This method has the advantage of not needing the re-estimation of a model to estimate out-of-sample prediction, so we use it
for model and variable selection where models with greater expected out-of-sample prediction are assumed to be more trustworthy for

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Fig. 3. Kernel density estimates of the distribution of comfort responses by video name and infrastructure class ordered by mean rating.

inferences, a common approach for model building (McElreath, 2020).

All the models we considered include varying effects (sometimes called “random” effects), allowing the average rating to vary by
Person (making them multi-level models). Similarly, all models included varying effects for Video, allowing the average rating to vary
by video. The varying effects allow the models to account for heterogeneity in ratings by person and video not otherwise captured by
person- and environment-level variables. We also allowed the effect of the one person-level experimental variable (“within” experi­
mental group) to vary by video to adjust for differences in the variation of video ratings within infrastructure class.
We use the eight models (Table 2) to understand how influential the variables are for predicting comfort ratings by comparing
expected predictions between models. The Bayesian estimation procedure we employ to estimate all the models facilitates these as­
sessments (see Appendix A), and was chosen for its ease of (a) regularizing parameters so as not to overfit to the data, (b) interpreting
parameter uncertainty, and (c) use for simulation. In Appendix B we report summaries of the model parameters for the main effects and
final model. Because the final model had the best expected out-of-sample predictions, we use it for detailed inferences, scenarios
analysis, and discussion in the remainder of the paper.

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Fig. 4. Model parameter estimates as posterior kernel densities representing parameter magnitude and uncertainty. The intercepts are the threshold
(cut-point) parameters between the ordered classes.

3. Limitations

Like all study designs that employ surveys, our study is limited by the representativeness of the sample we obtain. Our UC Davis
sample offers a useful view into bicycling comfort, but it should not be interpreted as representative of current or prospective bicyclists
everywhere. Because our sample is from the UC Davis campus travel survey, it is dominated by young undergraduates (Fig. 2) and lacks
strong representation of older travelers who likely have different perspectives on bicycling comfort. We also have about twice as many
responses from women compared to men, and the share of bike commuters is also very high. These are common results from the annual
UC Davis campus travel survey. Women tend to respond to the survey at much greater rates than men and make up a greater share of
the campus population, and because Davis is a very bike friendly city and campus, bicycling is commonplace.
Our survey composition also inherently led to the definition of a design person that may not be ideal for transportation planning in
all cases. For example, we did not survey children, nor parents of children. Our sample does not capture differences in comfort by race

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Fig. 5. Model parameter estimates as posterior kernel densities representing parameter magnitude and uncertainty (continued).

and income, important variables for assessing transportation equity and justice. The lack of measurement of income and race also
limits our ability to judge the ramifications of an infrastructure minimum standard on transportation equity and justice. Measurement
of these and other important person-level variables is an important next step, as is the targeted recruitment in future studies of
populations most likely to benefit from street redesign. We think the continued refinement of the definition of a design person is a
logical next step which may lead to more clarity about infrastructure minimum design standards.
The concept of a design person and universal infrastructure minimums might fail to account for the comfort of hard-core recre­
ational cyclists who would find little improvement in comfort from slower car speeds and more operating space but much improvement
in comfort from improved pavement quality and other environmental characteristics that were ignored in this study. This limitation
also suggests the need for further refinement of the measurement of comfort. While perceived comfort and safety are largely syn­
onymous for bicycling (unlike for driving), in bike research they almost always relate to traffic-induced stressors. Measures of other
travel stressors for bicycling like fear of crime could be included to describe a more universal comfortable bicycling environment.
Our study is also limited in the variety of road environments we examine. Because we use videos from a prior study focusing on

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Fig. 6. Predictive probability of video rating by age and bike operating space. All other variables are held at their mean or reference categories to
simulate predictions. The points represent mean predictions and the shaded region the 90% prediction interval.

Fig. 7. Predictive probability of video rating by general comfort and bike operating space. All other variables are held at their mean or reference
categories to simulate predictions. The points represent mean predictions and the shaded region the 90% prediction interval.

urban and rural roads (Griswold et al., 2018), we were not able to examine characteristics of protected bike lanes and off-street paths.
This is unfortunate because prior research suggests that these types of infrastructure are important for providing comfortable bicycling
spaces. This limitation is most evident in our inability to simulate a comfortable environment for our designated design person (see
below). While we suggest the lack of protected bike lanes and off-street paths shouldn’t necessarily bias the comfort ratings of the
videos of on-street facilities, it is possible that by not including a more complete range of videos the comfort ratings are biased.
Notwithstanding these limitations, our study helps to highlight the features of on-street roads that might be altered to increase
bicycling comfort for some current and prospective bicyclists.

3.1. Model results

The effect of road class and bike infrastructure on bicycling comfort is apparent in descriptive plots of the distribution of comfort
ratings for each video prior to statistical modeling (Fig. 3). With videos ordered by mean rating, the top-rated roads are those with
either buffered bike lanes, or bike lanes adjacent to moderate speed traffic. The opposite is true of roads that are shared arterials, have
bike lanes adjacent to fast traffic, or have bike lanes on rural highways.
The model results provide insight into the effects of each variable while adjusting for the others. We present the parameter esti­
mates as posterior kernel densities in Figs. 4 and 5, splitting the model into two figures because of the large number of variables and
interaction terms. These plots indicate the magnitude of the parameter (its position relative to zero) as well as its uncertainty (the
width of its distribution). Because the full model includes numerous interactions between variables, we display both the Main Effects

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Table 3
Attributes of simulated arterials and collectors.
Arterial Collector

Scenario Poor Moderate Good Poor Moderate Good

Vehicle Volume High (>2 passing High (>2 passing High (>2 passing High (>2 passing Moderate (1–2 passing Low (0 passing
cars) cars) cars) cars) cars) cars)
Speed Limit [40,50] mph [40,50] mph [30,40) mph [30,40) mph [30,40) mph < 30 mph
Prevailing Speed – 5 mph 0 mph − 10 mph 5 mph 0 mph − 10 mph
Speed Limit
Bike Lane type None Conventional Buffered None Conventional Buffered
On-Street Parking Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Outside Lane Width 13 ft 11 ft 9 ft 13 ft 11 ft 9 ft
Bike Operating Space 0 ft 5 ft 11 ft 0 ft 5 ft 11 ft

Fig. 8. Predictive probability of video rating for three alternative arterial and collector street designs. Road environment variables for each scenario
are in Table 3, and all person-level variables are fixed to represent the design person. The points represent mean predictions and the shaded region
the 90% prediction interval.

and Full model parameter summaries for ease of interpretation. The parameter values between the two models are consistent (except
for those where the interaction effect changes their interpretation), so direct inferences from the Main Effects parameters are valid.
Many of the road environment variables showed strong effects, including high speed limit roads and bike lanes. Some variables had
weak effects even though evidence and theory suggest that they influence comfort, including on-street parking, outside lane width,
moderate vehicle volume (1–2 passing cars), and speed limits of 30 and 35 mph (in comparison to 25 mph) (Fig. 5).
Several person-level variables had a strong influence on comfort ratings. A person’s general comfort with riding a bike on a mixed
arterial road was the strongest predictor (Fig. 5). Other variables related to comfort, confidence, and broader travel attitudes had lesser
but still pronounced effects on comfort ratings (Fig. 5). Age and gender were also strong person-level predictors with younger par­
ticipants more likely to rate a video as comfortable and men more likely to do the same compared to women (Fig. 4).
However, the moderating effect of person-level variables on the influence of road environment variables was minimal. Most
interaction models we examined indicated marginal improvements in expected out-of-sample prediction when interactions between
person-level variables and road environment variables were included (Table 2). Only the interactions we selected for the Final model
(age and comfort bicycling on a four-lane street (two lanes in either direction) without a bicycle lane) proved strong enough to increase
model prediction (Table 2). Because direct inferences about magnitude of interaction effects are challenging to assess from parameter
summaries, we plotted counterfactual predictions of the strongest moderator (bike operating space) in Figs. 6 and 7. Those plots
indicate that while bike operating space had a stronger effect on comfort for older participants and those who are generally not
comfortable bicycling on a mixed arterial, the effects were modest as the difference between the three levels of bike operating space
(colored lines) were similar between panels.

4. Discussion

Of the many road environment variables, bike lanes and bike operating space showed the strongest positive effects on comfort
ratings, and high vehicle volume (more than 2 passing cars) and lack of space for bicycling showed the strongest negative effects. The
moderate and uncertain effects of other road variables on comfort ratings (see Fig. 5) appoint to the challenge of identifying

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independent features of a road that cause discomfort. The strongest relationships in the final models reinforce many prior findings
related to bicycling comfort: women and older participants were more likely to rate the videos as less comfortable than men and
younger participants, respectively; people with positive attitudes toward bicycling, greater bicycling confidence, and greater feelings
of safety and comfort in general were more likely to rate the videos as comfortable compared to those without those characteristics.
These results from this sample of campus travelers in a bike-friendly environment, many of whom bike for transportation regularly,
show similar person-level effects on bicycling comfort as a sample more representative of the general population (Handy et al., 2010).
Yet, even in this sample, the variation in comfort ratings between people (see Std. dev. (Intercept by person) in Fig. 5) is substantial.
This is not surprising considering the wide range in age and bicycling experience of campus travelers to UC Davis.
We used the model results to identify the person-level attributes associated with the more negative comfort rating and based our
definition of a “design person” on these attributes: a 57-year-old woman without children in the household who is not very comfortable
bicycling on major arterials and is in the 10th percentile for bike positive attitudes and the 90th percentile for car-focused or pro­
fessional lifestyle attitudes. If designs can make bicycling by this design person comfortable, they are likely to make bicycling
comfortable for most of our sample. The fact that the models predict that women rate the same roads as less comfortable overall (which
has been shown in numerous studies (Garrard et al., 2012)) and yet predict similar effects of bike infrastructure and other road
environmental variables on men and women alike indicates that designing roads to be comfortable for women will also result in roads
being comfortable for men to an even greater extent. Similar interpretations can be made for other person-level factors such as bike
friendly attitudes, further supporting the idea of using a design person as a guide. However, it is important to note that all the par­
ticipants in our sample have experience with bicycling in Davis (as a participant or observer) and thus may have acquired similar
preferences for road features; future studies with greater diversity of respondents over a greater diversity of environments are needed
to test the generalizability of our results.
To demonstrate the potential for street redesign to provide comfortable bicycling environments for the design person (without
protection and separation, which were not included in this analysis), we plotted model predictions from three alternative street designs
(Table 3) for an arterial and collector (Fig. 8). Simulating a road environment that would be comfortable for the design person proved
difficult (Fig. 8). Even for the best possible collectors and arterials (given the constraints of our data), the model predicts that on
average the design person would rate the roads on the uncomfortable side of the scale. This finding highlights the inability of on-road
facilities to enable comfortable bicycling for everyone and suggests that off-road or separated facilities may be the only environments
that have a chance to provide a perceived comfortable space for bicycling for the people most uncomfortable bicycling on city streets.
While on-street facilities may not allow comfortable bicycling for the design person, the improvement in the probability of the
design person rating the street as comfortable is a sign that improvements can make a difference. This is especially true when
comparing the “poor” and the “good” versions of the arterials and collectors in our simulation (Fig. 8). The predictions show that the
design person would have almost no chance of rating the road as comfortable with a “poor” design, but a 35–41% chance of rating the
road as comfortable with a “good” design. The difference in predicted comfort between these designs suggests that controlling vehicle
speeds and providing bike-specific infrastructure are important factors in creating a comfortable on-road bicycling environment. Speed
limits and actual vehicle speeds both need to be lowered to increase comfort, suggesting that traffic calming treatments that reduce
speed limits and reduce speeds below those limits could play an important role. The presence of bike infrastructure had more effect on
bicycling comfort than other characteristics of the road environment, a finding that reinforces the vast evidence on the importance of
bike lanes for bicycling comfort and behavior (Buehler and Dill, 2016). However, our models suggest that adding a standard bike lane
to a high speed, high volume arterial is not likely to succeed in creating a comfortable bicycling environment (see moderate arterial
scenario in Table 3 and Fig. 8). The strongest gains in comfort are made by pairing traffic calming with bike infrastructure (see the
“good” scenarios in Table 3 and Fig. 8).
Some of the assumptions in the “good” scenarios may be challenging to implement widely on urban streets. We designed a scenario
with 11 total feet of bike operating space within a buffered bike lane with a narrow 9 ft outside vehicle travel lane and a low speed limit
with prevailing speeds 10 mph lower than the limit. These parameters represent a clear departure from current designs in most US
cities. In many cases, planners and engineers may find it difficult to fit theses designs into their current streets given existing street
widths and traffic patterns. In those cases, the move away from on-street bicycling to protected and separated bike facilities is probably
warranted, although this study stops short of providing guidance for those facilities.
The model-based simulations suggest that when planning on-road bikeways, defining road environment parameters to meet some
minimum standard for a design person could be an effective way to ensure comfort for most of the population. While many bike studies
have focused on partitioning the population into classes (Clark et al., 2021; Damant-Sirois et al., 2014; Griswold et al., 2018) and
planning strategies have mirrored a population classification approach (Mekuria et al., 2012), it may be possible to have a single
minimum threshold for planning. This concept of an infrastructure minimum closely aligns with the planning phrase “planning for all
ages and abilities” that has been used in some cities (City of Vancouver, 2017) and in some planning guides (NACTO, 2017). The
primary caveat to the interpretation supporting a minimum infrastructure standard for on-road bicycling is that our study is limited in
our measurement of personal factors, in that it includes no measurement of race, income, or recreational bicycling. This could be one
reason why our results differ from a prior study of bicyclist safety and comfort using some of these same videos where the effect of road
environment variables strongly varied based on respondent classification; that study relied on a small convenience sample that might
also explain some of the differences (Griswold et al., 2018).

5. Conclusions

Our results suggest that to make on-road bicycling comfortable, traffic speeds must be low, bike facilities must be present, and these

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facilities must provide wide operating space. However, even these changes may not be enough to provide comfortable environments
for many current and prospective bicyclists (particularly those with the characteristics of the design person used in our analysis),
suggesting that protected and separated facilities are needed to provide comfortable bicycling environments for all. Our results also
indicate that a universal design threshold or infrastructure minimum might be a useful guide since the road environment variables in
this study were similarly effective across groups of people. The concept of a design person with infrastructure minimums is important
for planning because it obviates the need to design for different classes of bicyclists. The limitations of this study point to the need for
replications with more representative samples and to the importance of expanding this research to underrepresented populations that
are most likely to benefit from street redesign and comfortable bicycling environments. We do not mean to suggest that infrastructure
minimums should replace context-sensitive design, rather, we argue that minimum standards provide a simple way to assess whether
proposed designs are likely to achieve a level of bicycling comfort that would attract more bicycling. The results presented here add to
the evidence that improving street design is important for promoting bicycling, but street design is just one piece of the puzzle.
Planners must ensure that infrastructure investments contribute to an interconnected network of bikeways that provide access to key
destinations, as shown in other studies (Furth et al., 2018; Lowry et al., 2016). And while an examination of perceptions of bicycling
comfort can produce insights useful in guiding infrastructure investments, before-and-after evaluations of how actual road im­
provements change bicycling comfort as well as bicycling behavior are needed.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Dillon T. Fitch: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Supervision, Methodology, Formal analysis, Writing
– review & editing, Software, Data curation, Validation, Visualization, Investigation, Writing – original draft. Jane Carlen: Meth­
odology, Formal analysis, Writing – review & editing, Software, Data curation, Validation, Visualization. Susan L. Handy: Concep­
tualization, Methodology, Writing – review & editing, Supervision.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to
influence the work reported in this paper.

Acknowledgement

This research was supported by the National Center for Sustainable Transportation (NCST) at the University of California, Davis and
by the California Department of Transportation. A special thanks to Julia Griswold for allowing us to use the video recordings and field
data from her research and for her suggestions on the experimental design portion of the study. We would also like to thank all the
research participants for their time and effort.

Appendix A. Extended methodology

Data cleaning and variable selection

Several predictor variables, such as an individual’s housing unit type, had non-response rates over forty-five percent. We
considered imputing missing data for several variables that had missing entries but found that only age could be reliably imputed. To
impute missing ages (roughly three percent of the entries) we used primary role (e.g., student, faculty, etc.) because it had a strong
correlation with age and no missing data itself. We used the version of the age variable with missing values imputed when estimating
models. We excluded from modelling the variables with nearly half or more of their responses missing, and as a result all variables
considered had less than ten percent of responses missing. We excluded a small number of survey responses with missing values for
many of the variables we included in the modeling. This resulted in the loss of data from fewer than 100 individuals out of the original
sample of 3089, with the exact number depending on the specific analysis.
We transformed some categorical variables to have fewer, more general categories. This helped to avoid small bin sizes that could
lead to issues with model fitting (e.g., overfitting leading to unreliable inferences). For example, we converted responses about one’s
usual mode of transportation to UC Davis from a 13-category variable including entries like “taxi services” and “electric bike” to a four-
category variable with possible values: “bike”, “car”, “public transit”, and “other” with 6869, 4688, 2923, and 812 entries respectively.
Some variables had strong correlations, such that including all available variables in a model could generate misleading results. For
example, the correlation between whether a street is divided, and its number of lanes is 0.88 (all four-lane streets in our data are
divided, 17 out of 19 two-lane streets are not, and one-lane streets cannot be divided by definition). The correlation between posted
speed limit and prevailing car speed on streets in our data is over 0.9. Some opinion variables (treating them as numeric variables on a
scale from one to five) also showed moderately strong correlations. For example, the correlation between whether someone is satisfied
with their commute trips to the UC Davis campus and whether they think their commute trips usually go well is about 0.6, whereas
those variables are negatively correlated (− 0.5 and − 0.4 respectively) with whether traveling to campus causes respondent stress.

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In some cases, we removed variables that were highly correlated with others, especially if one side of the correlated pair had more
missing responses. For example, one’s primary role (undergraduate student, graduate student, visiting scholar, staff or faculty) is
highly correlated with one’s reported level of education, but education level had more than fifty percent missing entries. The data show
a similarly strong correlation between rent share (<5% missing) and rent split (~70% missing).
We fit ordered logistic regression models with and without penalty terms to the variables retained after data cleaning to explore
conditional effects on comfort ratings and filter out inconsequential variables. We used the lasso penalty term implemented in the R
package glmnetcr (Archer and Williams, 2012) and the polr function from the MASS (Venables and Ripley, n.d.) package for this
analysis, and subsequently removed factors from further consideration which had both no clear theoretical motivation and provided
little association with comfort ratings. For example, a respondent’s opinion of how environmental concerns affect their choice of daily
travel proved to have little association with comfort ratings and lacked a clear causal mechanism for effecting bicycling comfort.

Model form and estimation

To estimate the confirmatory models we used the R package brms (Bürkner, 2017) which is an interface for the Stan computing
language (Stan Development Team, 2018). We used the default estimation algorithm (dynamic Hamiltonian MCMC), with tuning
parameters adapt_delta = 0.9, and max_tree_depth = 16, and ensured that each model parameter MCMC chain converged (rˆ< 1.01),
and that the models produced no other diagnostic warnings from Stan. Our general model structure is as follows:

( ( ) ) ∑M
Pr yi < k = αk + αperson[i] + αvideo[i] − (βG +βG video[i] )Gi − m=1 βm Xmi
log ( )
1 − Pr yi < k
[ ] ([ ] )
αvideo 0
∼ MVNormal ,Σ
βG video 0
( ) ( )
Σ σv 0 σv 0
= Ω
0 σ βG 0 σβG
Priors
(α1 , ⋯, αk ) ∼ Normal(0, 1.5)
( ) ( )
αperson 1 , ⋯, αperson n ∼ Normal 0, σp
(βG , β1 , ⋯, βm ) ∼ Normal(0, 0.5)
( )
σ v , σ p , σ βG ∼ HalfStudentT(3, 0, 0.5)
Ω ∼ LKJcorr(2)

( )
Pr(yi ≤k)
Where log 1− Pr(yi ≤k)
is the log-cumulative-odds that response value yi is equal to or less than a possible response category k (Very

uncomfortable, …, Very comfortable). αk are the intercepts for the k thresholds between the k + 1 response categories. αperson[i] is the
vector of intercepts that vary by person, αvideo[i] is the vector of intercepts that vary by video, βG is the common slope and βG video[i] is a
vector of unique slopes (by video) for the effect of Gi (a indicator variable for within class treatment group see Section 3.1.2). βm are the
slopes for Xmi (predictor variables including interactions, m), Σ is the covariance matrix factored as a diagonal matrix of video level
standard deviations (σ v , σβG ) and correlation matrix Ω. The correlation matrix has ones on the diagonal and one parameter (off-di­
agonal) representing the correlation between the two video-varying parameters. Each βm Xmi term is subtracted from the intercepts to
ensure that a positive βm value from an increase in Xmi results in an increase in the average response. This is because a decrease (hence
subtraction) in the cumulative odds for every outcome below the maximum results in a shift of probability toward the higher response
categories. This equation is slightly generalized from the actual model because the R package brms automatically parameterizes
models (for efficiency reasons) by centering all variables and converting the correlation matrices to Cholesky factors prior to esti­
mation (Bürkner, 2017).
We selected priors based on visual inspection of prior predictive simulations (McElreath, 2020). These are model simulations with
only priors (no data) are plotted on the outcome scale to determine the plausibility of prior predictions. We determined plausibility
based on our knowledge of the general variation in bicycling comfort ratings and variation in survey responses more generally. We
settled on priors that allowed occasional extreme predictions (e.g. nearly 100% of the predictions on one side of the scale), but more
often predicted equal responses across the scale range. These included normal (Gaussian) priors for intercepts and slopes, Student’s t-
distributed priors for scale parameters, and the LKJ prior for the correlation parameter which is the commonly recommended
(McElreath, 2020).

Appendix B. Model parameter summaries

Table B1

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Table B1
Parameter summaries for the Main Effects and Final models.
Main Effects Model Final Model

Variables Parameter mean sd mean sd

Intercept [1] α1 − 1.825 0.588 − 1.810 0.598

Intercept [2] α2 − 0.197 0.588 − 0.163 0.598
Intercept [3] α3 1.292 0.589 1.336 0.598
Intercept [4] α4 2.155 0.590 2.202 0.598
Intercept [5] α5 3.119 0.590 3.169 0.599
Intercept [6] α6 4.912 0.592 4.963 0.601
Std. dev. (Intercept by person) σp 1.679 0.034 1.681 0.035
Std. dev. (Intercept by video) σv 0.879 0.180 0.872 0.179
Std. dev. (“Within” experimental group by video) σG 0.347 0.073 0.343 0.072
Cor. (Intercept, “Within” experimental group by video) Ω[2,1] − 0.061 0.237 − 0.038 0.245
“Within” experimental group (1/0) G 0.235 0.101 0.238 0.097
Woman (1/0) β1 − 0.363 0.079 − 0.366 0.079
Age (z-score scaled to 0–1) β2 − 0.749 0.196 − 0.302 0.265
Child under 18 years old in household (1/0) β3 − 0.244 0.119 − 0.233 0.119
Bike is usual commute mode (1/0) β4 0.176 0.079 0.165 0.081
I like riding a bike β5 0.510 0.147 0.520 0.147
(ordered scaled to 0–1)
I need a car to do many of the things I like to do (ordered scaled to 0–1) β6 − 0.251 0.119 − 0.250 0.120
I feel safe bicycling on campus β7 0.816 0.142 0.830 0.139
(ordered scaled to 0–1)
I like using public transit β8 0.382 0.125 0.375 0.124
(ordered scaled to 0–1)
I need to dress professionally for my job (ordered scaled to 0–1) β9 − 0.227 0.117 − 0.219 0.115
traveling to campus stresses me out β10 − 0.481 0.127 − 0.502 0.130
(ordered scaled to 0–1)
I am very confident riding a bike (1/0) β11 0.822 0.121 0.823 0.123
Uncomfortable on mixed arterial but would ride there (1/0) β12 0.943 0.088 0.944 0.088
Comfortable on mixed arterial (1/0) β13 2.380 0.103 2.406 0.191
On-street parking (1/0) β14 0.198 0.341 0.176 0.345
Outside lane width (feet scaled to 0–1) β15 − 0.047 0.448 − 0.053 0.469
Moderate vehicle volume (1–2 passing cars) (1/0) β16 0.057 0.359 0.065 0.364
High vehicle volume (>2 passing cars) (1/0) β17 − 0.524 0.331 − 0.503 0.337
Bike operating space (feet scaled to 0–1) β18 0.564 0.440 0.548 0.447
Speed limit [30,40) mph (1/0) β19 0.009 0.352 0.025 0.348
Speed limit [40,50] mph (1/0) β20 − 0.499 0.398 − 0.453 0.381
Conventional bike lane (1/0) β21 0.558 0.357 0.559 0.357
Buffered bike lane (1/0) β22 1.062 0.422 1.076 0.415
Prevailing vehicle speed - speed limit β23 − 0.294 0.427 − 0.255 0.445
(mph scaled to 0–1)
Moderate or high vehicle volume with no bike operating space (1/0) β24 − 0.928 0.365 − 0.828 0.363
Age × Bike operating space β25 1.236 0.314
Age × Speed limit [40,50] mph β26 − 0.313 0.224
Age × Prevailing vehicle speed - speed limit β27 − 1.184 0.307
Age × Moderate or high vehicle volume with no bike operating space β28 − 1.008 0.224
Comfortable on mixed arterial × On-street parking β29 0.276 0.113
Comfortable on mixed arterial × Outside lane width β30 0.100 0.230
Comfortable on mixed arterial × Bike operating space β31 − 0.708 0.159

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