Decision support for cycling infrastructure planning: A case study in Přerov, Czechia

Abstract

Speaking about strategical planning, proposing new cycle paths is based on both quantitative evaluating and qualitative respecting strategic intent of the city. The main goal of the paper is to extend currently accepted approaches in modelling of cycling infrastructure towards geostatistical and multicriterial analysis. The research documents a comparative study of different interpolation techniques producing raster surfaces for further processing together with Euclidean distance surface of points of interest. Choosing an appropriate interpolation method, IDW, EBK, RBF, Ordinary Kriging (OK) with spherical variogram, Ordinary Kriging (OK) with linear variogram, Simple Kriging (SK) with spherical variogram and Simple Kriging (SK) with linear variogram) were considered based on state of the art analysis and further examined. EBK and OK (spherical variogram) achieved very similar values bringing the most accurate predicts and small error estimation. Considering two variants (safety and suitability for construction) determining weights, two sets of proposals were presented. Finally, it was find out that none of examined variants itself can be the ideal solution but mixture of both. Using topological overlay missing segments (connections between existing cycle paths) were recommended for new cycle paths construction.