The impact of public bike-sharing systems on mobility patterns: Generating or replacing trips?

Abstract

Bike-sharing systems allow occasional and regular users to travel by replacing other transport modes for the same trip or generating a new journey. Our research assesses the demand for Lisbon’s public dock-based bike-sharing system (BSS), named GIRA. This paper aims to identify the determinant factors that influence the potential of the BSS to generate new trips or replace previous modes using a conditional logit model based on a survey of 3112 BSS users. The survey results indicate that GIRA generated approximately 20% of the BSS trips, i.e., they would not have been realized if GIRA did not exist. The remaining BSS trips replaced other motorized (55%) and non-motorized (25%) trips. The main determinants explaining a higher likelihood of replacing different modes are having a yearly GIRA pass and a bike-sharing station within a 5-min walk. In contrast, regular car users are more likely to generate new trips, suggesting they use bike-sharing for recreational purposes. The findings provide policymakers with an assessment of determinants which may influence bike-sharing users to generate or replace trips from other modes and, consequently, define policies to potentially increase bike-sharing.

Keywords:

• Bike-sharing
• built environment
• cycling
• latent demand
• modal shift
• travel behavior

Disclosure statement

The authors report there are no competing interests to declare.

Acknowledgements

This work is part of the research activity carried out at the Centre of Civil Engineering Research and Innovation for Sustainability (CERIS), the Centre for Innovation in Territory, Urbanism and Architecture (CiTUA) and the Centre for Architecture, Urbanism and Design (CIAUD). The work has been funded by Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT) in the framework of the following projects UIDB/04625/2020 (CERIS), UIBD/05703/2020 (CiTUA), UIDB/04008/2020 and UIDP/04008/2020 (CIAUD).

Notes

1 GIRA subscription plans: https://www.gira-bicicletasdelisboa.pt/passes-e-tarifarios/