01589766

Component

This study investigates the effects of demographic and built environment characteristics near bike sharing stations on bike sharing ridership levels in four U.S. bike share systems: California Bay Area, Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis/St. Paul Bike Share. While previous studies have focused on the analysis of origin stations in isolation, this project considers both origin and destination station characteristics as well as the tripmaking patterns between station pairs. The authors developed BikeSEM, A Structural Equation Model (SEM) to forecast the ridership between every pair of stations in the bike share system. Using SEM methodology instead of conventional linear regressions they were able to make best use of available ridership data from three demotions: total rentals from each stations, total returns to each stations and ridership between each pair of stations. Forecasting bike share ridership at Origin-Destination level can help to improve future active transportation planning. For example the authors can prioritize bike path projects knowing popular origin and destination bike station pairs. This project also expands on previous studies by including the network effects of the size and spatial distribution of the bike sharing station network and by comparing experiences across systems; particular attention is paid to data quality and consistency issues raised by a multi-city analysis. Relative to previous models, this model will be more widely applicable to a diverse range of communities and help those interested in adopting bike sharing systems to predict potential levels of ridership and identify station locations that will serve the greatest number of riders.

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF20 Standing Committee on Bicycle Transportation. Alternate title: Bikesharing Ridership Forecast Using Structural Equation Modeling

01584066

16-6573

English

22p

2016

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Digital/other

Figures; References; Tables

Bicycle facilities; Bicycles; Built environment; Demographics; Forecasting; Ridership; Vehicle sharing

Chicago (Illinois); New York (New York); San Francisco Bay Area; Twin Cities Metropolitan Area (Minnesota)

Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-6573

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Jan 12 2016 6:53PM