Visual communication of bicycle routes using cartographic symbolization

In times of a pandemic, advancing climate changes and housing respectively parking space shortages in large cities, bicycles are becoming increasingly important as an alternative means of transportation. This increasingly replaces taking the train or car to everyday destinations that are close to hand. Aspects such as attractiveness, safety and comfort play an important role on these journeys. If one takes a look at the widely available navigation applications, it quickly becomes clear that these vary little in their visual communication of bicycle routes or show little or no bicycle-specific route information, although the possibility would exist.

The present work focuses on the visualization of specially selected features that occur on a bicycle route and that influence comfort while driving. Routes in an urban environment, which are represented by edges of a graph, are mainly used for visualization. These edges of a route are individually mapped with a visual variable each so that the underlying feature appears in a map display. The variants created in this way for one of five characteristics are tested in a user study for efficiency, effectiveness, attractiveness and suitability and compared with more information-rich visualizations. The result of the evaluation reveals that color representations as well as representations with symbols or signatures are perceived as the most ideal.