Estimating latent cycling and walking trips in Montreal

Abstract

Many cities adopt strategies to increase the modal share of walking and cycling, aiming to reduce the negative impacts of car trips. Despite such projects, strategies and infrastructure promoting active modes, modal shares of walking (10.1%) and cycling (1.6%) remain relatively small compared to the car (54.3%) in the Greater Montreal Area. In this context, it seems relevant to access the upper bound of the potential of cycling and walking. This paper proposes a methodology to estimate the latent walking and cycling trips in an urban area using large scale Origin-Destination (OD) data. The method builds on previous research and accounts for the distance overlapping zone for walking and cycling trips to obtain a pooled estimation of active transportation latent trips. The methodology is mainly based on a sequential process using trips reported during the 2013 OD survey in Montreal. Results show that 5.2% of daily motorized trips (427,813 trips) could be made by walking and 19.4% (1,605,244 trips) by cycling. From these, 57.1% were made as car drivers. 2.8% of motorized trips could be transferred to both walking and cycling. These trips were allocated to either walking or cycling using an overlapping process based on trip distance: 45.9% of them (1.3% of total trips) are transferred to latent walking trips and 54.1% (1.5% of total trips) to latent cycling trips. When we consider latent trips, modal share of walking and cycling would respectively increase from 10.1% to 14.7% and from 1.6% to 18.7% while share of car driver would decrease from 54.3% to 42.5%.

Keywords:

• Cycling
• household survey
• latent trips
• threshold distance
• walking

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to acknowledge the association Vélo Quebec for its interest and support. They also acknowledge the Montreal Committee on travel surveys for providing access to the data for research purpose as well as the Mobilité Chair Partners: Ville de Montréal, Société de transport de Montréal, Autorité Régionale de Transport Métropolitain et Ministère des Transports, de la Mobilité Durable et de l’Électrification des transports du Québec.