The Impact of Weather Condition and Built Environment on Public Bikesharing Trips in Beijing

As bicycling regains popularity around the world, the Beijing Public Bikesharing System, launched in 2012, allows users to access shared bicycles for short trips. After five years of operation, while the system is widely used, it faces the problems of bike unavailability and dock shortage at various stations due to the tidal characteristics of bicycle travel. It’s necessary to investigate the influence of different weather conditions and nearby built environment of stations on bikesharing trips. Using historical trip data from 2016, concerning 543 stations in Beijing, log-linear regression models are developed to estimate the impact of daily weather and time events on trip generation and attraction. Moreover, the effects of built environment variables such as land use and transport infrastructure are investigated both on workday and non-workday ridership at the station-level. The results indicate temperature is not linearly associated with daily ridership. Daily usage decreases according to rainfall, snowfall, wind speed and weekends/holidays. Light and heavy pollution have no significant influence on bikesharing demand; however, severe pollution has a negative influence on usage. The effect of transport infrastructure (subway stations, bus stops and bikeway length) is crucial in increasing bikesharing demand. The number of residence locations and shopping locations is generally associated with usage. Proximity to colleges does not show an obvious ridership increase, which is different from other cities. Parks encourage bikesharing usage during weekends/holidays time than workdays. The findings may help planners or managers to design and modify public bikesharing stations effectively, increasing usage while reducing rebalance costs.

• Supplemental Notes:
  • This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ANF20 Standing Committee on Bicycle Transportation.
• Authors:
  • Weng, Jiancheng
  • Lin, Pengfei
  • Liang, Quan
  • Alivanistos, Dimitrios
  • Ma, Siyong
• Conference:
  • Transportation Research Board 97th Annual Meeting
  • Location: Washington DC, United States
  • Date: 2018-1-7 to 2018-1-11
• Date: 2018

Language

• English

Media Info

• Media Type: Digital/other
• Features: References; Tables;
• Pagination: 6p

Subject/Index Terms

• TRT Terms: Bicycle travel; Bicycles; Built environment; Infrastructure; Logistic regression analysis; Ridership; Trip generation; Vehicle sharing; Weather
• Geographic Terms: Beijing (China)
• Subject Areas: Environment; Operations and Traffic Management; Pedestrians and Bicyclists; Planning and Forecasting;

Filing Info

• Accession Number: 01657031
• Record Type: Publication
• Report/Paper Numbers: 18-04028
• Files: TRIS, TRB, ATRI
• Created Date: Jan 23 2018 9:29AM