Author: by Anton Galich, Simon Nieland, Barbara Lenz and Jan Blechschmidt
Summary:
Bicycle usage is significantly affected by weather conditions. Climate change is, therefore, expected to have an impact on the volume of bicycle traffic, which is an important factor in the planning and design of bicycle infrastructures. To predict bicycle traffic in a changed climate in the city of Berlin, this paper compares a traditional statistical approach to three machine learning models. For this purpose, a cross-validation procedure is developed that evaluates model performance on the basis of prediction accuracy. XGBoost showed the best performance and is used for the prediction of bicycle counts. Our results indicate that we can expect an overall annual increase in bicycle traffic of 1â€4% in the city of Berlin due to the changes in local weather conditions caused by global climate change. The biggest changes are expected to occur in the winter season with increases of 11â€14% due to rising temperatures and only slight increases in precipitation. View Full-Text
