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Bike-to-School

Analysis of cycling stress and accessibility for Toronto high schools



2021

This project supports Toronto’s ambitious goal of having 75% of all trips under 5 km made by walking or cycling by 2050. One common trip type within this range is the journey to school—yet the number of students being driven by parents has continued to rise. High school students face distinct mobility challenges: they are not yet able to drive, can no longer ride on sidewalks, and have aged out of most discounted transit fares. In response, the Bike-to-School project examines two central questions: How effectively does existing infrastructure support biking to school, and how accessible is it in practice? Moving beyond purely physical measures of accessibility, the analysis introduces a “stress budget” framework, which accounts for both travel time and the psychological comfort of cycling. Travel along high-stress corridors is discounted, while protected lanes are valued for providing peace of mind.

The analysis began by mapping the cycling infrastructure surrounding Toronto’s public high schools to assess how each school is served by the existing network. To capture the impact of rider stress, every network link was coded according to its level of stress. Streets were first categorized by road typology and then adjusted to reflect the degree of cyclist protection. The methodology, adapted from a framework developed by Furth et al. in their study of cycling stress in San Jose, was refined with feedback from the project client to ensure local relevance. Each stress level was then assigned an impedance value, or adjusted speed, that reduces travel efficiency on high-stress corridors, acknowledging that cyclists are less likely to use these routes for extended trips. These stress ratings were applied to all network links, with non-cyclable segments, such as highways, removed from the analysis.

To evaluate how the network supports biking to school, 15-minute isochrones were generated around each high school using standard network analysis tools. The travel times were then recalculated using the impedance-adjusted speeds to produce stress-adjusted isochrones. For most schools located near new cycling corridors, the analysis revealed a notable decrease in isochrone area, highlighting the importance of incorporating stress budgets into accessibility evaluations. When compared with socioeconomic data, the study also found that high-stress cycling environments are disproportionately concentrated in or adjacent to lower-income census areas, underscoring the equity dimension of cycling accessibility in Toronto.


Client: Cycle Toronto

Tools: GIS, Python
Level of traffic stress (LTS)
Base cycling isochrones for selected schools
Stress-adjusted cycling isochrones for selected schools
Comparing base + stress-adjusted cycling isochrone areasStress-adjusted cycling mobility for Toronto public high schools
(stress-adjusted cycling isochrone area as a percentage of base cycling isochrone area)
Stress-adjusted cycling mobility for Toronto public high schools
(average income overlay)