Abstract
This study takes the 39-day Glasgow Subway closure in July 2016 as a natural experiment to evaluate the effect of subway closure on bike-sharing trips. We find that bike-sharing trips increased by 20.7% for incoming trips and 20.1% for outgoing trips on average for each bike station in the proximity of subway station during the subway suspension. Some of this change persisted, with 12.4% of the increased bike-sharing trips remaining after the resumption of the subway service. Our findings suggest that first, subway and bike-sharing trips are substitutes; second, this temporary service disruption was not enough to break commuters’ long-term habits, and third, the diversion factors implied by our results are much lower than the recommended values for UK cities.
Highlights
Cycling has been gaining popularity in cities all over the world.1 One of the driving forces for this rise in popularity has been the introduction of measures to promote cycling, such as improving cycling infrastructure and events promoting utility cycling
It is apparent that there are more weekday shared bike trips than weekend trips, and there are slightly more Wednesday trips than the rest of the week. This is consistent with the existing findings of cycling behaviours (Raux et al, 2016, for instance), and the dominance of weekday trips shows that the trips we include in the analysis are more likely to be utility trips than recreational trips
We find an increase in bike-sharing trips during the suspension 20.7% (1.69 trips) increase for average daily incoming trips per station, 20.1% (1.65 trips) increase for outgoing trips), confirming that city centre subway and bike-sharing were substitutes, as found in existing literature. 12.4% of the increase persisted after the subway resumption
Summary
Cycling has been gaining popularity in cities all over the world. One of the driving forces for this rise in popularity has been the introduction of measures to promote cycling, such as improving cycling infrastructure and events promoting utility cycling. Cycling has been gaining popularity in cities all over the world.. One of the driving forces for this rise in popularity has been the introduction of measures to promote cycling, such as improving cycling infrastructure and events promoting utility cycling. While measures that encourage cycling by making cycling safer and more pleasant have direct effects on the number of cycling trips, it is of great interest to study the effects of other transport policies on cycling. From a transport planner’s perspective, under standing how different modes interact enhances demand forecasting, investment decision making and evaluating combinations of transport policies. One approach to studying how different transport modes interact has been to make use of disruptions which force people to break their habits
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