Travel Behavior Impacts of Transportation Demand Management Policies: May is the Bike Month in Sacramento, California

Abstract

Every year, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG) organizes the “May is the Bike Month” campaign to promote bicycling as a mode of transportation in the Sacramento region. In 2018, they conducted two online surveys – before the launch of the campaign and after its conclusion - to understand the effectiveness of the campaign in changing travel behaviors. We present the analysis of the information collected in this campaign. In this study, we integrated the before and after dataset through geocoding the residential location of each participant, and matching it with information on the built environment and a bikeability index of the home location (bikescore). We evaluate the effectiveness of the campaign through estimating three ordered logit models for the changes in bicycling frequency during three time periods: (1) before vs. during, (2) during vs after, and (3) before vs. after the campaign. In our preliminary analyses participants who were considering bicycling more and usually travelled by modes other than bicycling were found to more often increase their bicycling frequency than individuals who had already been regularly bicycling for more than six months. However, this increase was only temporary and largely disappeared after the end of the campaign.