Evaluation of a Scoring Approach for Pedestrian and Bicycle Projects

EasyChair Preprint 10959

Abstract

The recent increase in walking and biking trips throughout the US motivates the need to reconsider the incorporation of pedestrian and bicyclist facilities in roadway projects. However, state funding is limited and there are often many projects competing for the use of these funds. he Kentucky Transportation Cabinet (KYTC) has developed the Strategic Highway Investment Formula for Tomorrow (SHIFT) which is a process that systematically evaluates and recommends potential highway projects. SHIFT develops project scores based on objective measures that evaluate the potential of a project to address congestion, safety, benefit-to-cost ratio, asset management, and economic growth and a set of subjective scores that allow regional and local agencies to score the projects to address local needs and priorities. The objective scores account for 70 points while the subjective ones can account for additional 30. The study developed five scoring approaches for existing and proposed facilities and examined alternatives for incorporating these approaches into SHIFT. The scoring approaches considered allocating points for ped and bicycle improvements from either the objective scores or from the subjective components. A sensitivity analysis was conducted using the 2022 SHIFT projects. Each project with a pedestrian and/or bicycle improvement was scored from one to five (five is best) based on the difference between the score for its proposed improvement and the score for existing conditions. The analysis considered various funding scenarios and evaluated the rank change for pedestrian and/or bicycle projects as well as for all projects. The analysis showed that allocating 5 points for bicycle facilities and 5 for pedestrian facilities in SHIFT by subtracting a total of 10 points distributed equally among the other five objective SHIFT components resulted in the most inclusion of non-motorized user facilities in the final project selections.

Keyphrases: Bicyclists, Pedestrians, ped/bike improvements, project ranking

@booklet{EasyChair:10959,
  author    = {Daria Korostina and Nikiforos Stamatiadis and Wang Teng and Reginald Souleyrette},
  title     = {Evaluation of a Scoring Approach for Pedestrian and Bicycle Projects},
  howpublished = {EasyChair Preprint 10959},
  year      = {EasyChair, 2023}}