Exploring the Impact of Built Environment Factors on the Relationships between Bike Sharing and Public Transportation: A Case Study of New York

Abstract

Bike sharing offers a usable form of feeder transportation for connecting to public transportation and effectively meets unmet travel demands, alleviating the pressure on public transportation systems by diverting urban commuters. To advance the comprehension of how the built environment shapes the relationship between bike-sharing systems and public transport modes, we implement a categorization framework that divides bike-sharing data into three distinct patterns: competition, integration, and complementation, based on their coordination with public transportation. The SLM model is employed to investigate the complex correlations between the relationship patterns and four key groups of environmental factors encompassing land use, transportation systems, urban design, and social economy. We find a strong correlation between four groups of environmental factors and three relationship patterns. Furthermore, the built environment variables exhibit significant variations across the three patterns. Users in the competitive mode prefer the flexibility of shared bikes and place a higher value on the sightseeing and leisure benefits. Instead, users in the integration and complementation modes tend to prefer shared bikes to supplement unmet travel demand and place a higher value on commuting benefits. These findings can benefit urban planners seeking to encourage greater diversity in transportation modes and incentivize more commuting.

Keywords

• bike sharing
• public transportation
• spatial pattern
• geographical variability
• spatial autoregressive model