Impact of land use on bicycle usage: A big data-based spatial approach to inform transport planning

Abstract

Bicycling is an alternative of urban transport mode, which is significantly influenced by land use. This paper makes an effort to quantify the magnitude and direction of the impact. We first develop a theoretical framework to establish links between land use and bicycle usage. Then, trip data is crawled from Mobike, one of the largest newly emerging, free-floating bike sharing operators in Shenzhen (China), for a total of more than 7.8 million records over 191 consecutive days. And bicycling frequency, travel duration, and riding distance are obtained to be proxies of bicycle usage. Land-use characteristics regarding bicycling are comprehensively indicated by a set of standardized variables including three dimensions, land-use type, land-use mix, land-use connections, and 12 concrete indices. Panel spatial model is applied to quantify the associations at the district level with socioeconomics controlled. Results show that the percentage of green land has a remarkable impact on bicycle usage outcomes and land-use mix is positively associated with bicycling frequency. Density of intersections contributes to longer trip duration. Bicycle lane is a positive facilitator on workdays, while the number of stations is positively related to bicycle usage, especially frequency and distance. These findings provide insight into land use-transport interaction and could be of value to policymakers, planers and practitioners for transport planning while incorporating bicycling-friendly principles.

How Has the Shared Bike and Subway Ridership Integration in New York City Changed in Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic?

“…Generally, commercial and residential patterns are associated with more integrated usage. On the one hand, these land use types contribute to the increasing volume of bike-sharing stations, encouraging shared bike flows (Mateo-Babiano, Bean et al 2016, Zhao, Lin et al 2020. On the other hand, they are related to commuting trips, making shared bike an ideal mode of choice during peak times (Guo and He 2020).…”

“…In the case of Shenzhen, improving bicycle infrastructure in accordance with local conditions is emphasized. For example, there should be more dedicated lanes for cyclists in certain areas, depending on differences in demand (Zhao, Lin et al 2020). Moreover, even though some areas are saturated with shared bikes, passengers are still unable to use them freely in many cases, so it is necessary to frequently rebalance or adjust bikes according to real-time demand, particularly during peak times (Ji, Ma et al 2018, Zhao, Yang et al 2019, Liu, Ji et al 2020).…”

“…The determinants can be roughly divided into four categories: socioeconomic demographics, travelrelated, built environment, and other latent factors. Socioeconomic demographics such as user age, household income, employment density and car ownership have been evidenced to their impact on bike-transit integration (Ji, Ma et al 2018, Zhao, Lin et al 2020). In the study of Ji et al (Ji, Fan et al 2017), female, older, and low-income transit passengers are less likely to use shared bikes to access public transportation stations.…”

“…On the other hand, they are related to commuting trips, making shared bike an ideal mode of choice during peak times (Guo and He 2020). In addition, mixed land use is seen as an important influencing factor that increases the rates of cycling as a feeder mode to rail transit (Zhao and Li 2017, Guo and He 2020, Guo, Yang et al 2020, Zhao, Lin et al 2020). These efforts can provide a reference for the selection of built environment variables (see Table 1).…”

“…Despite the significant change in human mobility during the pandemic, how the bike-transit integration was impacted by the COVID-19 still remains questionable. In fact, it is widely believed that bike-transit integration is one of the important ways to promote a transit city and achieve efficient and sustainable urban transportation systems (Zhao and Li 2017, Lin, Zhang et al 2019, Ma, Zhang et al 2019, Guo and He 2020, Guo, Yang et al 2020, Zhao, Lin et al 2020). The integrated usage aims to encourage transit passengers to use a bike as a transfer mode to/from a transit station (Zhao and Li 2017).…”