Factors affecting orderly parking of dockless shared bicycles: an exploratory study

ABSTRACT

As dockless shared bicycles (DSB) have become more commonplace, disorderly parking behaviour has attracted public concern and infringes upon public spaces in urban areas. The current research explored factors that affect users’ decisions regarding where to park their DSB in order to examine the importance of intrinsic and extrinsic factors suggested to influence parking decisions. Following a literature review and focus group study, a survey instrument measuring social demographics, travel behaviour, parking behaviour, planned behaviour and motivation for prosocial behaviour consisting of 20 items was developed and deployed. Using ordered logit model estimation, users’ intentions for orderly parking of DSB was measured and influential factors enhancing or limiting intention were identified. The lack of a shared definition of ‘orderly parking’ is the most noteworthy factor affecting DSB parking. The empirical findings confirm the significant role played by social norms, reciprocity, communication responsibility and institutional environment in regulating and influencing proper DSB parking behaviour and suggest that these factors may represent a more important aspect to be accounted for than financial incentives.

KEYWORDS:

• Docked bikeshare programmes
• dockless shared bicycles
• parking intention
• sustainable transportation
• ordered logit model
• social norms
• sharing economy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the joint project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Joint Programming Initiative Urban Europe (NSFC – JPI UE) [‘U-PASS’, grant number 71961137005], the Natural Science Foundation of Beijing [grant number 9172014], the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [grant number 2018JBWB003], and the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation [grant number 61602028].