Brief reportTaking Up Cycling After Residential Relocation: Built Environment Factors
Introduction
Cycling is a moderate-to-vigorous intensity form of physical activity,1, 2, 3 and therefore a good way to achieve recommended levels of physical activity.4, 5, 6 Apart from the health effects of cycling for recreation and transport,7 cycling for transport has beneficial effects including reductions in air pollution, CO2 gas emissions, and traffic congestion.5, 8, 9, 10 To successfully stimulate cycling within a population, it is necessary to understand the factors that facilitate or inhibit cycling.
In the past decade, many studies related environmental factors to physical activity in general and to walking specifically.11, 12, 13 Studies on the association between the environment and cycling behavior are less common and mostly cross-sectional.14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19 Important limitations of cross-sectional studies are that environments may change in response to residents' preferences and that residents may choose to live in locations consistent with their preferred lifestyles.
Natural experiments of changes to the built environment that take personal preferences toward cycling into account could help determine how environmental changes are related to behavioral change. RESIDE is a longitudinal study of people moving into new neighborhoods in metropolitan Perth, Western Australia. The aim of this natural experiment was to identify how changes in objective and perceived environmental characteristics determine the uptake of cycling among formerly noncycling adults, independent of previous preferences toward cycling.
Section snippets
Study Design
The RESIDE study is a quasi-experimental longitudinal study of people moving into 74 new housing developments in Perth, Western Australia (details are described elsewhere).20 Data about self-reported cycling, individual factors, and self-reported and objective environment factors were collected before people moved to their new neighborhoods (T1: 2003–2004) and after relocation (T2: 2005–2006). The total longitudinal study sample consisted of 1427 participants. All participants in the study
Results
Table 1 shows the baseline characteristics of respondents who usually did not cycle at baseline and the percentage of noncyclists who reported cycling at follow-up. Multivariable regression analyses on the uptake of transport-related cycling (Table 2) showed that greater objective residential density, increased access to a park, and more recreation-related destinations were positively associated with an increase in transport-related cycling after relocation in the fully adjusted model. A
Discussion
Predictors of transport-related cycling and recreational cycling differed. The determinants of transport-related cycling were mostly functional: In areas with a high residential density and easy access to proximate facilities, residents were more likely to travel by bike. This is likely due to shorter distances between home and potential destinations. For recreational cycling, on the other hand, the neighborhood's physical layout appeared to be important, as indicated by determinants such as
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