On the design of leisure devoted cycling networks

Abstract

Due to the several benefits associated to cycling, the demand for bicycle devoted infrastructures has considerably raised in the last few years. Public resource investments into infrastructure provision increased to meet demand, despite of the lack of mature design and planning methodologies. Leisure intended cycling networks in particular, which are the topic of this work, are even less addressed. We revise the critical issues in cycling network design, present a design methodology for cycle tourist networks that integrates the specific features of the problem into a combinatorial optimization framework, and test the approach on realistic data comparing with previous contributions on this topic.