Prioritizing bicycle parking improvements: An application of the logsum approach

Increasing the number and quality of bicycle parking facilities is essential to promoting cycling. However, quantifying the benefits of such improvements is difficult and has not yet been the focus of research. Apart from rule-of-half-based approaches, logsum analysis is a method for estimating the consumer surplus of measures, reflecting actual behavior.

This paper presents such an analysis of a set of measures on the RWTH Aachen University campus as a case study. Considering only the direct consumer surplus, the economic efficiency of the analyzed measures diverges significantly. The replacement of inadequate front wheel racks has the best consumer surplus-cost ratio, while the construction of bicycle parking stations has the worst. Taking into account modal shift effects and related changes in externalities and reduced demand for car parking, the cost-benefit ratios of the measures would be much higher. Even though the presented logsum approach ignores these second-order effects and focuses exclusively on economic efficiency, it is still useful in practice for prioritizing potential measures. Apart from that, the results show that groups of cyclists benefit differently from certain types of measures depending on their student status, employee group, and the resale value of their bicycle. Additionally, the analysis emphasizes the importance of including informal parking when modeling bicycle parking behavior.