1364200 - Using Energy Expenditure as a Separation Measure to Understand the Potential Impacts of Electric Bicycles on the Accessibility of Older Adults

In 2020, there were 727 million people aged 65 or over in the world. This population is projected to more than double by 2050, reaching over 1.5 billion people. Ageing is associated with both loss of individual general mobility, which may result in social exclusion and decreased quality of life, and an increase in health costs to the individual and society. Physical activity and active travel have a great potential to attenuate such negative effects.
An important contributor to physical activity is the built environment of neighborhoods. However, built environment planning initiatives that focus on the specific needs of older adults in terms of health and independence are still scarce. In the absence of environments specifically designed for the ageing population, electrically assisted active transport modes (also known as electric micro-mobility) can play an important role in bridging physical activity and accessibility needs of older individuals. As reported by multiple studies, electric micro-mobility allows individuals to travel faster, farther and to overcome hilly environments.
In addition to speed gains, an aspect that is not widely investigated in accessibility studies, but extremely relevant when analyzing the older adult population, is the impact of electric micro-mobility on energy expenditure. Energy expenditure is particularly important for this group because the metabolic cost of any physical activity is greater in older adults than in young adults. If both velocity and energy expenditure are considered, accessibility levels using active modes may vary significantly between older and younger segments. Therefore, urban planning based on access measures that rely exclusively on distances or generic travel time thresholds may result in neighborhoods and cities that cater to the active travel needs of young adults but fail to accommodate older individuals’ needs, leading to an increase in inequity.
The current study has three objectives: (1) to explore the use of energy expenditure as an accessibility measure for active travel, comparing it to traditional time-based separation measures, (2) to investigate the potential impacts of conventional and electric bicycles on the older adult population level of access to opportunities, and (3) to analyze the potential for substitution of motorized trips by conventional and electric bicycles.
The investigation is based on the built environment and network of Greater Melbourne, Australia, and data from the 2012-2016 Victorian Integrated Survey of Activity and Travel (VISTA). The results confirm the hypothesis that traditional time-based separation measures overestimate the accessibility of older adults when compared to energy expenditure measures. Further, when energy expenditure separation measures are considered, the use of electric bicycles demonstrate great potential in increasing the number of opportunities that older adults can access through active travel.