Generation of "Biking Schedules" for Bicycle Travel Analysis. Issue 36 (December 2018) - Mohamed, Amr
With an increasing focus on bicycling as a mode of urban transportation, there is a pressing need for improved tools for bicycle travel analysis and modeling. This paper introduces "biking schedules" to represent archetypal urban cycling dynamics, analogous to driving schedules used in vehicle emissions analysis. Three different methods of constructing biking schedules with both speed and road grade attributes are developed from the driving schedule literature. The methods are applied and compared using a demonstration data set of 55 h of 1-Hz on-road GPS data from three cyclists. Biking schedules are evaluated based on their ability to represent the speed dynamics, power output, and breathing rates of a calibration data set and then validated for different riders. The impact of using coarser 3, 5, and 10 s GPS logging intervals on the accuracy of the schedules is also evaluated. Results indicate that the best biking schedule construction method depends on the volume and resolution of the calibration data set. Overall, the biking schedules successfully represent most of the assessed characteristics of cycling dynamics in the calibration data set (speed, acceleration, grade, power, and breathing) within 5%. Future work will examine the precision of biking schedules constructed from larger data sets in more diverse cycling conditions and explore additional refinements to the construction methods. This research is considered a first step toward adopting biking schedules in bicycle travel analysis and modeling, and potential applications are discussed.