Mads Paulsen
Mads is an Assistant Professor at the Technical University of Denmark who specialises in quantitative models for cycling. His research covers methodological development and large-scale application within various fields including network design, choice modelling, and traffic simulation. Mads is also a member of the Steering Committee of CRB.
Session
In Copenhagen the two main reasons for choosing the bicycle is that it is i) easier, ii) faster. Luckily, as a space-efficient mode of transport, bicycle traffic are not very prone to congestion, why cyclists often get around quickly. However, in urban settings the flow of cyclists is often interrupted, and especially in (signalised) intersections considerable delays occur.
For motorised traffic, travel delays is often seen as a major societal challenge, and has in Denmark led to extensive expansion of motorways and a national commission on congestion. A metric to drive this agenda - and the cost-benefit analyses supporting it - is the estimation that the annual total delay for car traffic is 84 million hours, corresponding to a societal loss of 3.7 billion euros per year when applying official unit prices by the Danish Ministry of Finance.
In an ongoing research project, we use cyclist GPS trajectories and geostatistics to map and quantify cyclist delays across Denmark. The project pinpoints exact critical spots where cyclists are waiting (unnecessary) long or are otherwise delayed, and quantify their delay while taking into account inter-personal speed preferences of cyclists. These are subsequently upscaled with modelled transport flows to compute and monetise annual cyclist delays, which allows deriving a total societal loss due to cyclists delays -- equivalent to that for cars that is currently driving the political agenda.
But is this the best way to utilise the information derived from the analysis of the project? Maybe not. The session presents the types of visualisations and metrics that can be derived from the research project, and asks participants how they would utilise such kind of information to either spark a debate on infrastructural injustice, push forward a more bicycle-friendly urban development, or foster new, deeper research informed by the findings of the project.