Impacts of Bike Sharing on Transit Ridership

Abstract

Biking is an active, environmentally friendly, and sustainable transportation mode that facilitates short utilitarian and recreational trips. As such, cities around the world have been implementing bicycle sharing/renting programs at stations in a wide network so that a traveler can mount one close to their origins and drop it off at a station nearest to their destinations. In addition, bike sharing programs can solve the first-mile and last-mile connectivity problems of transit modes. Such programs also enable short trips that were previously impossible without using transit modes. This research investigated the relationship between New York City (NYC) subway ridership and the NYC bike sharing program known as Citi Bike. This study adopted the Spatial Lag Model (SLM) to explore the spatial dependencies between variables; moreover, the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) model was applied to compare the relative performance of SLM. The SLM coefficient estimates indicate that bike sharing trips around a subway station were positively associated. The number of bike sharing stations were negatively associated with subway ridership. This study’s findings can be used to develop policies and initiatives that will help to better integrate bike sharing programs with transit services to increase the attractiveness of bike sharing programs and maximize subway ridership.