Resumen de Análisis de las variables que inciden en la movilidad en vehículos motorizados de dos ruedas en la ciudad de barcelona
MOBILITY provides accessibility to people, goods, services and information, favoring the implementation of socio-economic activities. The more efficient mobility becomes, the greater human development and quality of life tend to be.
Motorcycles and mopeds are powered two wheelers (PTWs). Their small dimensions, lower operating costs and many possibilities to park for free make PTWs very versatile vehicles and efficient modes of transport in dense urban areas.
The use of PTWs in metropolitan areas is a growing global phenomenon, especially in congested urban environments and in developing countries. Interestingly, unlike cars, their level of use is more uneven. In Spain, as well as in most European countries, there has been an increase in the number of PTWs, but their frequency varies substantially among cities. Barcelona is the Spanish city with the most PTWs and their use has experienced a boom over the last few decades. Barcelona is a city highly dependent on motorcycles.
The growing use of PTWs in urban mobility has brought an increase in the demand for information about the subject. Knowledge about the variables that shape PTW ownership is useful in transport management, infrastructure planning, road safety, and mobility policies. This information will help provide more accurate solutions to deal with urban transportation problems.
This thesis has been conducted to analyze the variables that affect PTWs mobility in the city of Barcelona, identifying factors underlying the mode choices behavior, characterized by the high use of the powered two wheelers. The main objectives of this thesis are to find the factors that have caused Barcelona’s increasing use of PTWs, and also identify the variables that explain the greater use of PTWs in Barcelona when compared to other Spanish cities. In order to assess the evolutionary trend of the number of PTWs in Barcelona, a time series has been built with a trend projection.
A statistical-mathematical model of the growing evolution of the number of PTWs in Barcelona has been built. The high coefficient of determination gives a particularly high goodness-of-fit. The independent variable that is significantly related and statistically explains the increase in the use of PTWs in Barcelona is "the large-scale deployment of the number of on-street pay parking spaces”. In Barcelona, congestion pricing has been indirectly introduced by on-street parking taxation schemes. The increase of car parking operational costs has produced a positive effect by reducing the use of the car over the last twenty-five years. As a side-effect, these schemes also cause an increase in the use of PTWs as a cheaper alternative.
A multiple regression model has been built in order to identify the factors that could contribute to the explanation of why Barcelona has a high number of PTWs in comparison to other Spanish cities. The results suggest that PTWs are used significantly more in Barcelona due to a temperate Mediterranean climate (moderate high temperatures and scarce meteorological events), favorable morphology (high population density in a moderate urban extension) and the highest rate of female PTW ownership in Spain.
The main conclusions of this thesis are: a better understanding of the PTW mobility patterns, the finding that the implementation of indirect congestion pricing policies in Barcelona unintentionally encourages PTW use; the identification of the influence that climate has on PTW transport modal choice, the relevance of the "gender factor” to explain the increase of PTW use, the building of the motorization time series evolution in Spain, which validates the sigmoid curve (Gompertz) shape, the verification of the motorization saturation threshold predictions, the challenging of the Kutnets curve to model the evolution of PTWs; the identification of a range of city size most conducive to the use of PTWs and the finding that the distribution of PTW use is not geographically homogeneous.
