Cycling in a Crisis: Employing Quasi-Experimental Designs to Estimate the Effects of Provisional Bicycle Infrastructure

Abstract

During the Covid-19 pandemic, provisional infrastructure was implemented to support active transportation. However, the planning community still requires deeper understandings of the relationships between provisional infrastructure and mobility. We use the example of a roadway closure in Philadelphia to investigate how one active mode-bikeshare use-changed in response to provisional infrastructure. We employ differences-in-differences models that measure the semi-causal effect of provisional infrastructure on bikeshare trip durations and find that even during the pandemic, when trip durations increased across the bikeshare system, provisional infrastructure had an additive and statistically discernible impact above and beyond the pandemic effect.

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Publication Date

3-2026

Publication Title

Journal of Planning Education and Research

Department

Computer Science

Document Type

Article

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X251330590

Notes

Special Series: Natural Experiments in Planning Research: Opportunities, Challenges, and Future Directions

Keywords

Bikeshare, Covid-19, Differences-in-differences Quasi-experiment

Language

English

Format

text

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