Assessing the relationship between neighbourhood characteristics and cycling: Findings from Amsterdam

Although a variety of studies have sought to assess the relationship between urban form characteristics and cycling levels (Muhs & Clifton, 2016), few of them have done so in contexts where cycling constitutes a dominant form of transport. In the present study, we statistically explore the relationship between cycling levels, urban form and sociodemographic variables in Amsterdam at a postcode level of detail. Overall, our findings suggest that in a mature cycling city like Amsterdam, there exists a clear relationship between urban form and cycling rates, and that this relationship is probably stronger than in less mature cycling contexts. While cycling is significantly correlated with a variety of land use and destination accessibility variables, the most important underlying relationship appears to be between address density and cycling; after accounting for address density, other urban form variables are not significant predictors of cycling levels. However, we also found that the relation between cycling and address density becomes insignificant once we take the ethnicity and educational level of postcode residents into account. Given the strong positive association between address density and the educational level of postcode residents, it is difficult to distinguish between the effects of these two variables on local cycling rates.