Understanding residents’ sensitivity towards bicycle use: a case-study from Kalyan Dombivli: Major Project Part 1

Student name: Mr Krishna Y Khanna
Guide: Dr Deepty Jain
Year of completion: 2021
Host Organisation: Smart Kalyan-Dombivli Development Corporation Ltd (SKDCL).
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Surendra Tengle

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Abstract:

Bicycle use and its benefits have prompted cities across the globe to introduce bicycle networks as an alternative and sustainable mode choice. The network of segregated bicycle lane and promotion of support facilities have been advocated extensively as an effective way to induce modal shift in favour of bicycle, necessary to reduce air pollution and traffic congestion within in the city.

However, Indian cities are still perceiving bicycling through a project base approach. But their coverage is limited to cities with high bicycle user-captivity. The City of Kalyan – Dombivli has both low amount of bicycle ownership and even lower proportion of cyclists. In this backdrop, the paper tries to analyse the population sensitivity towards bicycling, in order to provide robust recommendations towards making a bicycle plan. The study does a GIS based assessment of cyclability potential in the city, using the road network data aggregated at ward committee level, and argues for integration of its suburban railway network with a robust bicycle network.

For the study, an extensive structured questionnaire was prepared to capture bicycle perception across socio-economic, demographic and personal attributes. Ordinal data highlight travel priority and city-wide bicycling challenges was collected for 39 individuals from the population are collected through offline and online mode. This data was analysed by using Kruskal- Wallis H – test to identify significance in the response variation along the various user groups. It was noticed that group with prior bicycling experience was more sensitivity and mature toward conceptualising a bicycle trip, than those who do not cycle. Furthermore, the group was also more influenced by external changes like weather conditions and road quality. The findings suggest that city with low bicycling level have to make softer intervention to attract newer riders and along with making robust bicycle network interventions.

Keywords: Bicycle Plan, User perception, Network Integration, Kalyan-Dombivli.