How built environment shapes cycling experience: A multi-scale review in historical urban contexts

2025-09-19

AI Summary

Existing research on cycling experience in historic cities remains fragmented, prioritizing objective metrics (e.g., network connectivity) while neglecting cyclists’ subjective perceptions (e.g., safety, comfort), physiological responses (e.g., stress, fatigue), and the influence of streetscape cues on micro-scale experiential quality. Method: This study develops a multi-scale analytical framework linking “macro-level cyclability” to “micro-level cycling willingness,” integrating urban planning, behavioral science, and neuroscience. It treats the streetscape as an embodied medium of lived experience and employs a systematic literature review alongside mixed-method data collection—including objective environmental audits, subjective surveys, and emerging biometric tools (e.g., eye-tracking, physiological sensing)—to achieve deep integration of objective and subjective data. Contribution/Results: The framework provides a theoretically grounded, empirically informed basis for designing cycling-friendly interventions in historic urban contexts, bridging the explanatory gap between built-environment provision and actual behavioral response.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Activity and Plan Recognition
• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science

Application Category

• Security and Privacy: Large-scale security measurements
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Web measurements

Abstract

Understanding how built environments shape human experience is central to designing sustainable cities. Cycling provides a critical case: it delivers health and environmental benefits, yet its uptake depends strongly on the experience of cycling rather than infrastructure alone. Research on this relationship has grown rapidly but remains fragmented across disciplines and scales, and has concentrated on network-level analyses of routes and connectivity. This bias is especially problematic in historical cities, where embedding new infrastructure is difficult, and where cycling experience is shaped not only by spatial form but also by how cyclists perceive, interpret, and physically respond to their environment - through psychological factors such as safety and comfort, physiological demands such as stress and fatigue, and perceptual cues in the streetscape. We systematically reviewed 68 studies across urban planning, transportation, behavioural science, neuroscience, and public health. Two scales of analysis were identified: a macro scale addressing the ability to cycle and a micro scale addressing the propensity to cycle. Methods were classified into objective and subjective approaches, with hybrid approaches beginning to emerge. We find a persistent reliance on objective proxies, limited integration of subjective accounts, and insufficient attention to the streetscape as a lived environment. Addressing these gaps is essential to explain why environments enable or deter cycling, and to inform the design of cities that support cycling as both mobility and lived experience.

Problem

• Examining built environment's impact on cycling experience
• Addressing fragmented research across disciplines and scales
• Focusing on historical cities' unique cycling challenges

Innovation

• Multi-scale analysis of cycling experience
• Hybrid objective-subjective methodological approaches
• Streetscape as lived environment integration