Propensity to cycle among students in Bellville,Cape Town: A best-worst scaling approach

Abstract

Cape Town can be described as a Starter Cycling City as it has a policy intention to grow the mode share of cycling from a marginal base to about 8% by 2030. With a possible 1.5 million peak period trips, this would amount to 120 000 bicycle trips. It is not clear that strategies that have been employed to date are likely to help achieve this goal. This paper builds on a targeted approach to promote cycling, focussing interventions to enable cycling within one geographic node at a time and for specific market segments prevalent in each node. Previous work identified the substantial student community in the Bellville area of Cape Town as a market segment that is likely to adopt cycling should the main barriers to cycling be removed. Students at the Cape Peninsula University of Technology were surveyed using a Best-Worst scaling approach to determine their attitudes and key barriers to cycling. Safety and security concerns were raised as among the most significant barriers to cycling, which aligns with the attitudes of cyclists globally and commuters in South Africa. In contrast, students don’t view the fitness or discomfort as a barrier to cycling, and very few students experience family or social pressure to keep them from cycling. This paper concludes with insights gained from the survey, and how this information might contribute towards achieving the City’s objective to grow cycling as a mode.