Hampered by Hardcoreness : How Group Cycling Events Fail to Impact the Everyday Travel Behavior of Novice Cyclists

Group cycling events have become a common practice in the cycling community to encouraging every day cycling. That said, scant literature has evaluated their actual impact on changing participant travel behavior. The purpose of this research is to investigate how group and social dynamics influence cycling behavior. We survey individuals participating in a monthly group cycling event in San Luis Obispo, CA to investigate their motivations for participation and if that participation is reflective of their everyday travel behavior or if is not. We hypothesize that these kinds of events have an impact on encouraging non-regular cyclists to bicycle. We find quite the opposite, those that these events encourage participation of who, on-the-whole, already regular cycling commuters — what we define as ‘hardcore’ cyclists. This offers opportunities to rethink such programs and target them to everyday other users