Designing and evaluating bicycle networks from a sustainable urban mobility perspective

The promotion of sustainable transportation modes, such as cycling, has become a key aspect of urban planning. Designing an efficient bicycle network is a complex optimization problem involving the analysis of factors such as connectivity, safety, and infrastructure layout. Therefore, this study proposes an optimization strategy for designing a bicycle network for the city of Parma under a limited budget. The approach considers possible interventions, including the construction of new bicycle lanes and the improvement of existing ones, to minimize cyclists' perceived travel cost between multiple origin-destination pairs. Since cyclists do not always prefer the fastest routes, the weights assigned by them to factors such as distance, safety, and practicability are also identified and incorporated into the travel cost computation. A mathematical formulation, a branch-and-bound method, and two heuristic procedures based on dynamic programming for the knapsack problem are developed to determine high-quality combination of interventions.