High impact prioritization of bikeshare program investment to improve disadvantaged communities' access to jobs and essential services

Abstract

Bikeshare programs are increasingly popular in the United States and they offer an important alternative mode choice for many types of last-mile trips. Bikeshare systems have not captured high levels of ridership from disadvantaged populations, but there is some evidence that current bikeshare systems have specifically targeted certain populations to ensure sufficiently high demand for profitability. Far less attention has been paid to bikeshare programs' potential to provide greater access to jobs and essential services for disadvantaged communities. This paper uses two case study cities (Chicago and Philadelphia) to first, examine whether bikeshare systems have targeted specific populations, and to second, quantitatively assess the potential for bikeshare systems to provide greater accessibility for disadvantaged communities. Our results demonstrate that a well-designed bikeshare system can generate greater accessibility improvements for disadvantaged communities than the same system would produce for other populations. Using a newly developed spatial index that combines the potential for increased access to jobs and essential services, the level of bike infrastructure, and the disadvantaged population shares, we also find evidence that existing bikeshare systems have been specifically designed to target certain ridership. We find that locating stations in proximity to disadvantaged communities has the potential to increase household access (by bike and by bike-to-transit) to jobs and essential services and can close accessibility gaps between mobility constrained populations and critical services. The spatial index can be applied to identify potential locations to locate bikeshare stations (dock-based bikeshare systems) or rebalance bikes (dockless bikeshare systems) to address bikeshare equity issues.