Abstract
Transportation has become the largest CO2 emitter in the United States in recent years with low gasoline prices standing out from many contributors. As demand side changes are called for reducing car use, the fast-growing sharing economy shows great potential to shift travel demand away from single-occupancy vehicles. Although previous inter-disciplinary research on shared mobility has explored its multitudes of benefits, it is yet to be investigated how the uptake of this eco-friendly sharing scheme is affected by gasoline prices. In this study, we examine the impact of gasoline prices on the use of bikeshare programs in three U.S. metropolises: New York City, Boston, and Chicago. Using bikeshare trip data, we estimate the impact of citywide gasoline prices on both bikeshare trip duration and trip frequency in a generalized linear regression setting. The results suggest that gasoline prices significantly affect bikeshare trip frequency and duration, with a noticeable surge in short trips. Doubling gasoline prices could help save an average of 1933 gallons of gasoline per day in the three cities, approximately 0.04% of the U.S. daily per capita gasoline consumption. Our findings indicate that fuel pricing could be an effective policy tool to support technology driven eco-friendly sharing mobility and boost sustainable transportation.
Highlights
A demand-side approach is urgently called for in the U.S transportation sector—a major greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter fueled by persistently low gasoline prices
The naïve generalized least squared (GLS) model shows that a 1% increase in gasoline price leads on average to a 0.726% increase in total bike trip duration, ceteris paribus (Column 1) and a 0.824% raise in trip frequency (Column 3)
Average trip duration decreases slightly by 0.098%, the decrease is not statistically significant (Column 5). These results suggest that a higher gasoline price encourages more bikeshare usage, especially short-distance trips
Summary
A demand-side approach is urgently called for in the U.S transportation sector—a major greenhouse gas (GHG) emitter fueled by persistently low gasoline prices. In 2016, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from the transportation sector have surpassed the electric power sector for the first time since the late 1970s (Dunn 2017). While the power sector has been transitioning from carbon intensive coal combustion to clean energy sources like natural gas and renewables, progress in the transportation sector has been slow mainly due to low gasoline prices that contribute to increasing vehicle miles traveled (Cortright 2019) and the popularity of suburban utility vehicles (SUVs) and trucks of low fuel efficiency (Puentes and Tomer 2008). Fuel economy has been improving within each vehicle type and class globally, the trend has suspended in the United States since 2017, reflecting the rise in sales of light truck and SUVs and a slide in the sales of lighter cars (IEA 2018).
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