Bicycle Infrastructure Usage and its Spatial Condition in the Upper Rhine Region

Bicycle tourism is an important form of green tourism promoted around Europe. And building regional bicycle lanes and bicycle systems is increasingly encouraged by the EU. Taking the bicycle tourism activities and infrastructures in the Upper Rhine region as an example, this paper summarizes the current characteristics of regional bicycle lanes (EuroVelo 15) usage, reviews the typology of bicycle tourism, and analyzes the influence factor form regional and territorial scale. For the regional scale, we are using web crawler technology to collect data from the tourism social media websites and tourism administration websites in order to get the current usage of regional bicycle lanes. The thesis analyzes the relationship between the popularity of regional bicycle lanes and regional influence factors such as transportation facilities, accommodation and restaurants, and GPS navigation. Furthermore, specific parts of the regional lanes are chosen as case studies to analyze the spatial and landscape choices and their impact on the cycling tourism practices. This paper concludes that the underuse of regional lane along the Rhine River is mainly due to the lack of accessibility to facilities. Also, the underuse of north EuroVelo 15 section is due to the fact that this section is relatively less attractive, notably in terms of spatial design

and landscape quality.