| Many U.S. universities are realizing an increase in the number of single occupancy vehicles coming to campus. Their campus planners wonder how they will provide parking for all of these automobiles. Instead of focusing their transportation planning only on the automobile, some universities are concentrating on alternative ways for students and employees to travel to and from campus. One of these alternatives is bicycle transportation.; This research looks at ten bicycle friendly university communities to find out what components have made these places bicycle friendly. Their successful components are presented along with five tools that help create bicycle friendly campus communities; (1) a financial analysis tool that calculates the benefits and costs of bicycle transportation compared to providing automobile parking for the same number of users, (2) a questionnaire to help university transportation planners determine if bicycle transportation will work at their university, (3) a checklist of advice for universities who are starting the process of improving bicycle transportation in their campus community, (4) a checklist to help analyze how bicycle friendly the campus currently is, (5) a bicycle connections layout tool to help identify origins and destinations within a campus community for determining important transportation links/corridors in that community. To help show how the tools are used, an application is made to Michigan Technological University in Houghton, Michigan. |
