Abstract

The primary objectives of this study were to propose and validate a procedure for estimating the capacity of midblock bike lanes by taking into account the characteristics of three types of two-wheeled vehicles, i.e., bike-style pedal electric bikes (e-bikes), scooter-style pedal-free electric bikes (e-scooters) and conventional pedal bikes (c-bikes). The focus was on uninterrupted-flow midblock bike lanes on urban streets. Field data were collected at seven midblock bike lanes in Nanjing, China. We developed composite headway distribution models to identify the individual headway distributions of e-bikes, e-scooters, and c-bikes, which were then aggregated to estimate the overall headway distribution based on the proportions of these three types of two-wheeled vehicles in one lane. A distribution-free estimation approach was used to determine the key parameters of the composite headway distribution models. The proposed capacity estimation method was validated against field data. The estimated capacity values varied from 2,800 to 3,300 bikes/h/m for e-bikes and e-scooters and 2,000 to 2,500 bikes/h/m for c-bikes. The aggregated capacity of a midblock bike lane varied from 2,400 to 2,900 bikes/h/m. The average bike equivalence factors for the e-bike and the e-scooter to the c-bike were 0.76 and 0.75, respectively. Results suggest that the proposed procedure provides reasonable outcomes and can be used to estimate the capacities of midblock bike lanes with varying geometric design characteristics and traffic compositions.