NSF Award
2425029
Strengthening American Infrastructure (SAI) is an NSF Program seeking to stimulate human-centered fundamental and potentially transformative research that strengthens America’s infrastructure. Effective infrastructure provides a strong foundation for socioeconomic vitality and broad quality of life improvement. Strong, reliable, and effective infrastructure spurs private-sector innovation, grows the economy, creates jobs, makes public-sector service provision more efficient, strengthens communities, promotes equal opportunity, protects the natural environment, enhances national security, and fuels American leadership. To achieve these goals requires expertise from across the science and engineering disciplines. SAI focuses on how knowledge of human reasoning and decision-making, governance, and social and cultural processes enables the building and maintenance of effective infrastructure that improves lives and society and builds on advances in technology and engineering.<br/><br/>Cities and towns across the United States have witnessed rapid growth of electric bike (e-bike) usage in recent years. Along with this growth has been an increase in e-bike crashes, highlighting the urgent need to improve bicycle infrastructure. This SAI project seeks to improve bicycle infrastructure planning and design across U.S. communities to promote safer and more widespread e-bike use. Until now, transportation planners and engineers typically design bicycle infrastructure with a traditional, non-electric bike in mind. This is problematic because e-bikes are faster, heavier, and larger than traditional bicycles, creating new challenges for planning and designing bicycle infrastructure. This project strengthens American bike infrastructure to prepare for an e-bike future by studying how different types of bicycle facilities affect cyclists' and e-cyclists' perceptions of comfort and safety, as well as their riding behavior. The research helps transportation planners make better infrastructure investment decisions to increase bicycle use, enhance rider safety, and promote transportation equity.<br/><br/>Cyclists' perceptions of the bicycle infrastructure they interact with play a major role in shaping their cycling behavior and infrastructure-related choices. However, little is known about whether and how the comfort and safety perceptions of e-bike users and traditional bike riders differ. Grounded in social and behavioral theories, this project advances knowledge of e-bike users' infrastructure needs and preferences by developing a social and cognitive psychological account of cyclists' and e-cyclists' comfort and safety perceptions across cycling environments. A multidisciplinary research team develops and tests a novel socioecological theory of planned behavior model by collecting and analyzing multi-sourced, complementary datasets such as survey, interview, bike trip trajectory, and surface street imagery data. The integration of these datasets, coupled with state-of-the-art generative AI technologies and modeling approaches, advances bicycle infrastructure research on both theoretical and methodological fronts. Numerous stakeholders, including transportation agencies, bikeshare operators, and bicyclist organizations are engaged throughout the project for co-design activities to maximize societal impacts.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
