BIKE PHILLY
How can we address the challenges faced by both visitors and long-time residents who bike?
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Making the choice to cycle: enhancing quality of the cycling facilities
2.
Having confidence in your route: from turn-by-turn navigation to cognitive wayfinding
Shifting gears from traditional route planning to visitor-based needs for 2026
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Traditional bike route planning in Philadelphia relies on connecting trip destinations, street width, and typology. However, the current infrastructure, dominated by conventional advisory lanes and shared lanes, compromises cyclist safety. Addressing this issue involves pivoting to Parking Separated Bike Lanes, ensuring enhanced safety levels.
Our innovative strategy focuses on Activity-Based route planning that encompasses three key components - Visitor Destinations, commercial corridors, and bike-share facilities. This approach not only prioritizes the unique needs of visitors, enhancing their experience, but also proves advantageous for the city by boosting the local economy. Post-2026, these upgraded facilities will continue to benefit residents in the long run. Visitors prioritize safe, scenic, and engaging routes and this behavior creates a mutually beneficial scenario for Indego, visitors, and the City of Philadelphia.
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Having confidence in your route—from turn-by-turn navigation to “cognitive mapping”
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Many people who are unfamiliar with where they’re at might jump to Google Maps, enter their destination, and get a point A to point B output. This is what’s known as the turn-to-turn method—you follow step by step, trusting that it gets you from point A to point B.
However, this doesn’t really give you the genuine confidence to navigate a new city. Even if a process is strictly point A to B, people often rely on landmarks, other people, and route quality or comfort to guide their decisions. This is known as wayfinding orientation, which engages other ways of imagining our landscape beyond a strict spatially accurate geography. Residents and visitors alike acquire a richer understanding of how to get around—a process known as cognitive mapping—through receiving both wayfinding orientation and turn-by-turn directions.
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An example of turn by turn navigation (top) versus cognitive mapping (bottom)
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Wayfinding through Orientation (Schwering et al. 2017)​
How can we maximize the quality and accessibility of information available at an Indego station?
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Most signage at Indego stations is purely advertising, which is key for the system to maintain a healthy revenue stream, but does nothing to enhance the bike share experience.
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A handful of new Indego stations, such as the one featured to the right in Point Breeze, includes some enhanced wayfinding elements such as time and distance from locations of interest as well as a small map.
