Comparing distance-based and stress-based centralities to rank priority locations for cycling infrastructure investments in small-sized cities

The lack of technical guidelines to define investment priority locations is one of the barriers to cycling in emerging countries, limiting the preparation of urban mobility plans even when legally required. The objective of this paper is to propose and compare two approaches, with and without considering the cyclists’ perception of stress (assessed with the LTS, or Level of Traffic Stress), to determine the relative importance of road segments in the network and to rank priority locations for investments in cycling infrastructure. A case study was conducted in the city of Bariri (Brazil), for which the overall contribution of each network link to the identified cycling routes was mapped and ranked according to both criteria. The spatial distribution of differences between homologous ranks (i.e., ranks of the same network link according to different criteria) was also mapped, and the spatial autocorrelation between these differences was assessed by the Local Moran’s Index, allowing the identification of road segments of greater similarity and dissimilarity between the proposed approaches for resource allocation.