Joint analysis of the impacts of built environment on bikeshare station capacity and trip attractions

Abstract

Shared micromobility is proliferating throughout the world. Many researchers have extensively studied the links among factors representing the built and natural environment and bikeshare demand. One common feature of the existing demand models is that they view bikeshare infrastructure as a group of exogenous variables along with other influential factors. Indeed, this assumption is seldom true in planning practices. Bikeshare system operators usually allocate resources in dense urban areas based upon the environmental correlates. This study contributes to the literature by jointly exploring the determinants of bikeshare station capacity (i.e., the number of docking points) and trip arrivals at the station-level. The research dataset is constructed from the Citi Bike system in New York City in September 2016. The analytical results reveal that the effects of built environment characteristics on bikeshare usage could be carefully considered during the system installation process. We find existing bicycle facilities do not significantly influence the supply of docking points at the station-level. However, they exert direct and positive effects on hourly trip arrivals. The findings improve our understanding of the bikeshare system installation process.