Effective planning is greatly dependent on the quality and availability of information. Ohio’s Bike and Pedestrian Program noted a deficiency in this area – a lack of a comprehensive bike facility inventory. Over the past year, ODOT has worked with local agencies and MPO partners to create a statewide GIS bike facility inventory. The inventory is designed to include many of the same components of the ODOT Road Inventory, to help facilitate relational integration of assets in the future.

This preliminary bicycle inventory has allowed for a statewide Level of Service (LOS) bicycle facility analysis to be conducted as well as the identification of potential statewide bicycle trunk routes that can be incorporated into the National Bike Route System Project initiated by AASHTO and Adventure Cycling. Both of these studies were conducted in GIS using statewide roadway and bikeway inventories, ArcGIS, Python, MS Excel and the planning level Bicycle LOS model from the Florida Department of Transportation 2009 Quality/Level of Service Handbook. As an indication of a roadway segment’s utility to cyclists, a LOS score was calculated for all segments present in the ODOT roadway inventory. The process was automated after careful selection of planning assumptions and default values. Following the LOS analysis of over 200,000 road and bikeway segments, an automated and LOS-informed optimal routing for bicycles between origin and destination (OD) points was conducted. Finally ODOT staff Interpreted the automated routing results to select final Ohio bicycle trunk routes.

This process was innovative in that it employed a balance of automation, state of the art planning techniques and expert informed shaping of the data inputs to most accurately reflect bicyclists perception of travel on the State’s facilities. The results also allow ODOT to prioritize improvements on critical roadway connections between bicycle facilities of statewide importance.