How do people cycle in Amsterdam, Netherlands?

Abstract

Nowadays, the bicycle is seen as a sustainable and healthy substitute for
the car in urban environments. The Netherlands is the leading country
in bicycle use, especially in urban environments. Yet route choice models
featuring inner-city travel that includes cyclists are lacking. This study
estimated a cyclists’ route choice model for the inner city of Amsterdam,
Netherlands, on the basis of 3,045 trips collected with GPS data. The main
contribution of this study was the construction of the choice set with an
empirical approach, which used only the observed trips in the data set
to compose the choice alternatives. The findings suggested that cyclists
were insensitive to separate cycle paths in Amsterdam, a city characterized
by a dense cycle path network in which cycling was the most prominent
mode of travel. In addition, cyclists were found to minimize travel
distance and the number of intersections per kilometer. The impact of
distance on route choice increased during the morning peak when schedule
constraints were more prevalent. Furthermore, overlapping routes
were more likely to be chosen by cyclists, everything else being the same.