Locating Potential Bicycle Links and Budget-Based Prioritization Utilizing Sensitivity Analysis: A Case Study

For Considering low vehicle speed in urban areas, there have been 465 fatalcrashes collectively in the urban municipality of Mashhad city all of whichinvolved bicycles or motorcycles, from spring 2010 until spring 2013. Thisaccentuates the necessity to allocate funding to decrease the number of crashes,especially, so that number of crashes decreases significantly in the vicinity ofbicycle lanes. Accordingly, to allot an economical budget to construct bicyclelanes seems logical. Additionally, it is likely to increase the share of bicycletravels contributing toward improvement in other issues such as pollution,congestion, and public health as well. As goal of this paper, introducing anetwork suitability function for varying budgets, prioritized potential links forbicycle lanes are specified. A model that incorporated integer programming wasproposed so that potential links could be ranked considering various budgetsusing sensitivity analyses. In other words, variables are ranked based on indicesto enable the decision makers to address critical links before others. In addition,insensitivity of simplified objective function to relative importance coefficient ofannual data can be implied as existence of a meaningful correlation betweencrashes per year in potential links; lack of modification in the network is likely tobe the cause of this correlation. Moreover, links that are planned by MashhadTransportation Studies Center experts are in agreement with final results of thispaper.

کلیدواژه ها:

Integer programming ، Sensitivity Analysis ، Bicycle Lanes ، Crashes