Abstract
In urban and suburban recreation areas, walking and cycling constitute an important part of leisure activities. Both activities involving motion, are not only carried out for recreation but also for commuting to and from work. The mixture of recreation and commuting cycling is a challenge for park management. Conflicts between user groups, such as walkers and cyclists, exist due to the different movement speeds and also different user profiles: walkers, leisure cyclists and cyclists who commute have distinctive degrees of acceptance towards other user groups. Another challenge for park management is the damage caused by the bicycles. There is damage to the surface of gravel trails due to the frequency of use and there is damage to the vegetation next to the trails as a result of evasive manoeuvres by the cyclists. Paved trails are preferred by cyclists as this results in increased speed.
Important issues associated with park management are: degradation of the soil surface in general, and trails in particular, as well as conflicts between different recreational users, such as walkers and cyclists caused by their different user profiles including different speeds and acceptance of social carrying capacities.
To shed some light on bicycling activities in Vienna, an analysis of the pattern of the temporal use of daily frequency of recreational and commuting cyclists was carried out, taking weather conditions into consideration. The results show that, principally, cycling is an activity performed during fine weather. This is especially the case for recreational use. Fine weather is interpreted as generally sunny weather with an ambient temperature of more than 5 °C, few clouds and no precipitation for a period of 1 year. In this study, the temperature, precipitation and cloud cover, as well as the thermal index ‘physiologically equivalent temperature’ (PET), were used as parameters to describe more precisely the dependence of both cyclist groups on the local weather conditions. Copyright © 2007 Royal Meteorological Society