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.