How Would We Cycle Today If We Had the Weather of Tomorrow? An Analysis of the Impact of Climate Change on Bicycle Traffic

Anton Galich, Simon Nieland, Barbara Lenz and Jan Blechschmidt
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Anton Galich: Institute of Transport Research, German Aerospace Center, Rudower Chaussee 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany
Simon Nieland: Institute of Transport Research, German Aerospace Center, Rudower Chaussee 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany
Barbara Lenz: Institute of Transport Research, German Aerospace Center, Rudower Chaussee 7, 12489 Berlin, Germany
Jan Blechschmidt: INWT Statistics GmbH, Hauptstrasse 8, 10827 Berlin, Germany

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 18, 1-22

Abstract: Bicycle usage is significantly affected by weather conditions. Climate change is, therefore, expected to have an impact on the volume of bicycle traffic, which is an important factor in the planning and design of bicycle infrastructures. To predict bicycle traffic in a changed climate in the city of Berlin, this paper compares a traditional statistical approach to three machine learning models. For this purpose, a cross-validation procedure is developed that evaluates model performance on the basis of prediction accuracy. XGBoost showed the best performance and is used for the prediction of bicycle counts. Our results indicate that we can expect an overall annual increase in bicycle traffic of 1–4% in the city of Berlin due to the changes in local weather conditions caused by global climate change. The biggest changes are expected to occur in the winter season with increases of 11–14% due to rising temperatures and only slight increases in precipitation.

Keywords: bicycle traffic; time series; weather; climate change; machine learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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