Assessing changes in job accessibility and commuting time under bike-sharing scenarios

Abstract

Bike-sharing improves individual mobility, considerably reshaping the landscape of job accessibility and commuting time. Existing empirical studies in urban transportation involving commuting usually collect survey data at the aggregate level. A comprehensive understanding of the influence of bike-sharing on commuting and job accessibility at the city level is still missing in developing countries. Using mobile phone data in Beijing, this study addresses these questions with a commuting mode model and cumulative accessibility model. The results indicate that bike-sharing could lead to a decrease in commuting time and an increase in job accessibility. The availability of bike-sharing services has a positive relationship with its effectiveness. Meanwhile, bike-sharing significantly reduces the horizontal and vertical inequality in commuting time and job accessibility at both the individual and spatial levels. These findings provide insights into the popularity of bike-sharing in China, shed light on the equity influence of bike-sharing, and provide a quantitative measurement of the benefit of bike-sharing.

Keywords:

• Job accessibility
• commuting time
• equity
• bike-sharing

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Visit the website with https://smartstepcompany.com/

2 One of the biggest telecommunications operators of China. For details, see the introduction of China Unicom https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChinaUnicom

3 See the news for details https://www.enterprisetimes.co.uk/2016/01/06/telefonica-smart-steps-into-china/

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant Number: 41830645, 41625003, 41771425, 41971331], and Smart Guangzhou Spatio-temporal Information Cloud Platform Construction [GZIT2016-A5-147]. In addition, Mei-Po Kwan was supported by grants from the Hong Kong Research Grants Council (General Research Fund Grant no. 14605920, 14611621; Collaborative Research Fund Grant no. C4023-20GF) and a grant from the Research Committee on Research Sustainability of Major Research Grants Council Funding Schemes of the Chinese University of Hong Kong. The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support from the China Scholarship Council. Yongxi Gong was supported by grants Shenzhen Science and Technology Innovation Commission [Grant Number: GXWD20201230155427003-20200822000944001].