Effects of Built Environment and Weather on Bike Sharing Demand: Station Level Analysis of Commercial Bike Sharing in Toronto

Bike Share Toronto is Canada’s second largest public bike share system. Bike Share Toronto provides a unique case study as it is one of the few bike share programs in a North American city that experiences severe cold climates and operates throughout the entire year. Using year-round real time trip data, this study analyzes the factors affecting Toronto’s bike share ridership. A comprehensive spatial analysis is performed and three regression models are developed at the station level. Results of the trip attraction and generation models provide meaningful insights on the influence of socio-demographic attributes, land use and built environment, as well as different weather measures on bicycle share ridership. The developed models can be used to assist policy makers and city planners to predict the monthly trip activity at potential station locations. A station pair (origin-destination) regression model is developed based on station to station paths’ level of service attributes along with other zonal level factors. Results show that station-to-station distance and the number of intersections with major roads have negative impacts on bike share ridership. In addition, for a given origin-destination pair, the higher the percentage of bicycle infrastructure with respect to the total route length, the higher the corresponding ridership. This model can be used to predict the trip distribution between station pairs based on the total trip activity at each station. The model can also be used to assess potential bike infrastructure development based on expected bicycle routes from/to potential station locations.

  • Supplemental Notes:
    • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF20 Bicycle Transportation.
  • Corporate Authors:

    Transportation Research Board

    500 Fifth Street, NW
    Washington, DC  United States  20001
  • Authors:
    • Mahmoud, Mohamed Salah
    • El-Assi, Wafic
    • Habib, Khandker Nurul
  • Conference:
  • Date: 2015

Language

  • English

Media Info

  • Media Type: Digital/other
  • Features: Figures; References; Tables;
  • Pagination: 15p
  • Monograph Title: TRB 94th Annual Meeting Compendium of Papers

Subject/Index Terms

Filing Info

  • Accession Number: 01555509
  • Record Type: Publication
  • Report/Paper Numbers: 15-2001
  • Files: PRP, TRIS, TRB, ATRI
  • Created Date: Feb 27 2015 10:03AM