State and Local Policy Program > Bicycling Facilities Research

The motivation for the University's work on bicycling facilities stemmed from the belief among some bicycle advocates and others that bicycle facilities can be marginalized in the general transportation planning process because of a lack of quantitative evaluation. Highway and transit investments are evaluated and justified using standard methodologies to estimate benefits and costs; no equivalent tools exist for bicycle-related investments. The hope is that better quantitative estimation tools not only will lead to better decisions regarding implementation of bicycling facilities, but will further legitimize bicycle investments more generally.