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The Humphrey School of Public Affairs is the University of Minnesota's school of policy and planning.


State and Local Policy Program

Bicycling + Nonmotorized Transportation

Comprehensive Bibliography of Bicycle Benefit and Cost Research

The pages linked below provide lists of significant research references on various topics related to bicycling policy. The lists do not at this time include every reference that we have found; we have focused more on those that are relatively recent and easily accessible, and on those that have been most useful to us for our research. Most sources have a web link listed; of those that do not, most are academic journals or government documents that should be available at most university libraries. The Transportation Research Record journal is often available at state DOT libraries, and possibly at some university libraries, or through interlibrary loan.

The sources we have found fall naturally into a few fairly distinct categories:

Amount of bicycling (demand): Documents that address why people do or do not bicycle, and that describe the amount and characteristics of bicycling and the people who do it. It can be broken into two subcategories, which overlap to some extent.

  • Measurement and forecasting: Describing the amount of bicycling in an area, either through direct measurement such as counts or diaries, or through developing forecasting models.
  • Surveys: Describing bicycling demand more from a qualitative or attitudinal perspective, focusing more on why it does or does not happen.

Benefits of bicycling: Documents that describe and sometimes quantify the various benefits that bicycling provides to those that do it as well as society more broadly. Again, the literature can be broken into two somewhat distinct categories.

  • Economic benefits: Addressing the impact that bicycling has on local and regional economies. Some reports focus on specific facilities such as rail-trail conversions and some on bicycling more generally.
  • Other benefits: All the other benefits that cycling confers that are not "economic" in nature (health, quality of life, congestion reduction, etc.)

Design-behavior-safety: Documents that address the three closely related issues of how facilities are or should be designed, how riders behave and how facility design impacts this, and rider safety and how it depends on facility design and rider behavior.

Urban design: A few academic papers that address how urban design and land use affects travel decisions; touching directly or by implication on bicycling.

Miscellaneous: A few sources that provide useful references or philosophical perspectives.