The Role of Bike Sharing in Promoting Transport Resilience

Abstract

A resilient transport network, which is significant for urban sustainability and security, is characterized by its ability to recover from disruptions subject to natural and man-made disasters. Bike sharing could act as a viable alternative in the case of public transit disruptions given its flexibility and various social, environmental, and economic benefits. This study aims to estimate quantitatively the potential of bike sharing to promote transport resilience, by using autoregressive negative binomial time series model to investigate the effects of public transit closures on bike sharing demand in Washington, D.C. area during 2015–2017. We find that (1) bike sharing can act as a supplementary mode to enhance urban transport resilience in the case of complete transit closure; (2) the proximity of bike sharing docks to metro stations has a powerful effect on propensity to use a bike sharing program; and (3) extreme weather is one of major barriers to bicycling. Planners can enhance resilience of urban transport networks by fully considering the capacity and usage of bike sharing docks, as well as the coherence of metro stations and bike sharing docks, in distributing and rebalancing activities.

A long-term perspective on the COVID-19: The bike sharing system resilience under the epidemic environment

“…These population-level health benefits have also been recognized. In recent years governments have set cycling targets to encourage the use of active transport to improve health outcomes ( Cheng et al, 2021 ; Woodcock et al, 2021 ).…”

Quantifying relation between mobility patterns and socioeconomic status of dockless sharing-bike users

“…In the past few decades, with growing concerns over global warming and rapid urban sprawl, numerous efforts have been devoted to promoting bikesharing in cities as a viable, greener, more resilient, and healthier mobility solution towards the transition to sustainable transportation [10,12,13]. As biking can reduce carbon emissions and improve public health due to its usage flexibility, saving of parking space and fossil energy by replacing short-distance motorized trips, increasing fitness, and reducing the stress of riders from cycling activities [14][15][16][17]. During the COVID-19 pandemic, bikesharing systems are proved to be more resilient [18] and safer to move around for essential needs in urban area with a high population density [19], since biking allows for greater social distancing than other means of public transportation [15].…”

Excess demand prediction for bike sharing systems

“…While several distributions have been used to model the bike arrivals (and departures) within a bike sharing, including negative binomial [ 24 ], Weibull [ 25 – 27 ] and Poisson [ 28 – 33 ], the latter is the most common choice for this task. Gast et al .…”