MRP

american suburbia: active travel by bicycle in extreme heat
overarching barriers to cycling in the usa
culture infrastructure safety effort
comfort
the question
how can you augment american suburbia
to prompt residents living in hot climates
to decrease their reliance on cars and
increase bicycle usage?
site context
El Paso
Austin
Dallas
Houston
1.5 | limitations
With limited direct, built environmentrelated
primary research on the causes
and effects of active travel in extreme heat,
the Project is limited by the question of
whether extreme heat is a non-negligible
influence on people’s decisions to use a
car over a bike rather than other factors
like shading, routing, infrastructure
availability, and others.
The Project is also limited by the global
spread of the case study cities. The
global spread and appeal of bicycling has
created cities around the world to learn
from. Unfortunately, the author of this
Project was unable to visit most cities and
had to rely solely on academic literature
and secondary resources.
1.6 | contribution to practice
The myriad causal factors in influencing
the relationship between people and
their mode choices are well studied and
increasingly understood. However, there
is little research that tests the possible
correlation between extreme heat and
active travel, while more exists on colder
weather and in milder climate contexts.
This Major Research Project aims to pull
together literature from not only the fields
associated with the built environment,
but also health, physiology, psychology,
and finance, among others, to attempt to
better understand the relationships and
possible correlations between extreme
heat and active travel patterns.
Furthermore, the Project looks at ways to
cater design to meet the needs of a built
environment inherently hostile to travel
modes other than cars, with additional
regards to the needs of different age
groups. This catered design is theoretically
applied to the study site and tested
through a research-led design approach.
flower mound, texas, usa
F2: Problem definition chart with location context
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