Route choice and speeds of cyclists in São Paulo

Over the past decades, cycling has become a more important aspect of traffic in S˜ao Paulo. In order to increase the number of bike users in the city, different improvements have been introduced. New infrastructure has been built to guarantee cyclists their own spot on the road, new regulations have been implemented to guarantee safety and awareness to other road users, as well as more room for cycling on Sundays and holidays to introduce cycling to new users. This thesis focuses on the collection, processing and analysing of cyclist trips in the city of S˜ao Paulo. Goal of the thesis is to gain more insight in the different aspects of cycling speed and route choice within S˜ao Paulo. The approach of cycling parties CicloCidade, BikeAnjo and Tembici, along with inviting people directly from the streets, led to 26 volunteers installing the Footprints travel app. Only 6 people made a total of 59 useful trips that could be used within this research. Almost 40% of the GPS points was not useful for data processing. A GIS comparison between the expected and collected routes showed a distance favour of 15% for collected routes. 75% of the road networks contained an average speed between 10 and 30 km/h. Highest speeds are being obtained on flat surfaces, with speeds decreasing as slope increases both uphill and downhill. Expected and collected distance on cycling facilities had a large overlap, with both routes having on average respectively around 10% and 9% of their distance on a cycling lane (ciclofaixa). Expected routes (14%) had, compared to the collected routes (10%), on average more distance on a cycling boulevard (ciclovia). Most common land use along the routes is residential, however when taking into account the average land use in S˜ao Paulo cyclists prefer to cycle along mixed, commercial and public land use. Cyclists take on average a route that is more hilly than (35% of routes), or as hilly as (25% of routes) the expected route. The external annotation environment and following survey have only been used by a minority of the volunteers and the data from these sources is therefore not used. Future research can contribute to the best way of approaching and making volunteers use the app, to obtain a larger and more scattered sample. As well as separating car and bicycle trips better or finding solutions to increase cycling experiences on specific route sections.