Intuitively usable Cycling Infrastructure – a systematic Literature Review

While infrastructure planning guidelines frequently emphasise the need of comprehensible, easy to use or unambiguously understandable infrastructure, they lack information on how to design such intuitively usable cycling infrastructure. Furthermore, while cyclists already criticise the current traffic system not to be intuitively usable, this issue will be even more relevant as cycling usage may increase in the next years. Thus, this paper presents a systematic literature review to identify studies that already investigated the intuitiveness of cycling infrastructure. Furthermore, this study aims to identify major research gaps. Searching three databases with a predefined set of keywords resulted in more than 1300 titles. Applying inclusion and exclusion criteria, eleven titles remained in the last review step and were analysed in detail. Results show that these studies use a variety of methods and terms to describe and investigate intuitiveness of various cycling infrastructure designs. Conclusions from these studies range from very specific infrastructure design recommendations over highly general design advices to recommendations that do not refer to infrastructure design at all. Three main research gaps were identified. Firstly, there are various infrastructure types that have not been covered by the studies. Furthermore, there is a need for basic research on how to apply principles of intuitive design to cycling infrastructure design in general. Lastly, a large amount of research investigated behavioural responses to infrastructural changes but was not designed to specifically assess intuitiveness. Thus, there are large research gaps to be filled by upcoming studies to design intuitively usable cycling infrastructure.