How bikesharing changed destination distance for its users: A case study of Chicago Metropolitan Area

Abstract

Shared bike use has been growing, especially post-pandemic, because it improves personal mobility and provides an alternative to walking while increasing connectivity to transit services. Existing research has examined the impact of these services on mode share and vehicle ownership. However, these services also hold the potential to influence the distance people travel to reach destinations. In this study, we examine the impact of Divvy shared bike services in the Chicago metropolitan region on the average trip distance of its users across all trips between 2008, when the service was not operational in the city, and 2018. We use repeated cross-sectional household travel datasets from 2008 and 2018 for analysis. We perform difference-in-difference regression to calculate the change in average trip distance for the shared bike user group. As there is no way to track people in repeated cross-sectional datasets, unlike a panel dataset, we use propensity score matching to match users between the two datasets. The results indicate that the average trip distance is reduced by 0.841 km (miles) for the shared bike user group with the presence of shared bike services. Shared bike users are more likely to live in urban areas where destinations are in proximity and use multi-modal travel, which could be a reason for this group’s reduced average trip distance. Given our findings, we recommend planning for shared bike services integrated with transit in urban areas and promoting mixed land use so that users can choose proximate destinations in dense urban areas.

Keywords

• Bikeshare
• Travel distance
• Quasi-Experimental
• Destination
• Causal Effect