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Abstract
The National University of Singapore (NUS) has ten faculties offering undergraduate and graduate programmes. The buildings of the different faculties have clustered in different parts of the campus depending on whether they are science, engineering, arts, business or medicine-related. Recent changes in the curriculum of the programmes offered by the faculties have emphasized a broad-based education, cross-disciplinary interaction and increased flexibility for students to determine their own individual study program. This inevitably requires the movement of students within the campus and campus transport is presently being provided by three separate internal shuttle bus (ISB) services that ply the campus. However, the limitations of the current road geometry, an undulating terrain, and a mature campus, have severely constrained any further increase in the frequency of service of the ISB or expansion of their routes. It has been suggested that an alternative non-motorized mode of transport be considered to alleviate current peak hour traffic jams and to cope with future increases in cross-campus transportation demand. The introduction of cycling routes would encourage students to change their mode of transport, and would split student traffic that is now confined to that using the ISB alone.

This paper describes the experiences gathered in using GIS technology to identify possible cycling routes and evaluate their feasibility using a multi-criteria approach based on safety, accessibility and existing land use. A weighted factor approach is used to integrate the different objectives, constraints and factors like gradient, distance, built-up areas, road intersections, road buffers, parking facility and other secondary factors specific to the particular areas under study. Routes are developed for predefined strategic origin-destination (O-D) points that are determined based on an estimate of student population in key buildings. A Geographical Information System (GIS) was used in this study to assemble the data and perform the spatial analysis needed to identify and evaluate the routes. Besides data analysis, the GIS proved valuable in the preparation of the different statistics and visuals for presentation. The paper describes some of the key lessons learned about using GIS technology to perform a multi-criteria transportation study.