Bike Comfort: Expanding our Understanding Through Data and Empathy

3:00 pm ET

Presenters:

• Adam Wood, Toole Design Group
• Cara Seiderman, City of Cambridge
• Shayda, Haghoo, San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency

What makes a street comfortable for biking? Is it the same for everyone? How does this understanding translate to planning and design decisions? The concept of bike comfort has greatly influenced how practitioners approach bicycle planning and design. Evaluating traffic volumes, speeds, and roadway configurations to estimate comfort has become common practice. However, practitioners and advocates increasingly recognize that whether people of all ages, abilities, and identities truly feel comfortable when biking is far more nuanced. In this webinar, planners from Cambridge, Massachusetts, and San Francisco, California, will describe how they are taking a deeper look at what bike comfort means and how this broader understanding influences their decision-making. In Cambridge, we will discuss how bikeway planning and design is intended to support the needs of a diverse population, and how a variety of factors influence people's perception of comfort. We also share data about some measurable impacts of implementing a more comfortable bicycle network. In San Francisco, we will discuss how data on slope, bikeway configuration, and context was used to develop a model that holistically reflects comfort, how this model was calibrated based on public input, and how it will be used to shape the City's forthcoming bike plan.

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