A new study by Booth School of Business Assistant Professor Elena Belavina, INSEAD Professor of Sustainable Development Karan Girotra, and INSEAD Ph.D. candidate Ashish Kabra found that cities can increase ridership on bike-sharing systems without spending more money on bikes or docking points by redesigning the network, according to a press release on the university’s website.
A bicycle-sharing system is a service where bikes are made available for shared use on a short term basis, allowing people to borrow a bike from point “A” and return it at point “B”. Many bike-share systems offer subscriptions and allow for each bike in the system to serve several users per day. In today’s ever-connected word, smartphone mapping apps show nearby stations with available bikes and open docks in many systems.
The study, “Bike-Share Systems: Accessibility and Availability,” determined that a 10 percent reduction in distance traveled to access a bike-share station can increase ridership by 6.7 percent, and that a 10 percent increase in bike-availability can increase ridership by almost 12 percent. Research took place over four months in Paris observing the Velib bike-share, collecting information on 349 bike stations every two minutes and gathering a total of 22 million data snapshots, or the equivalent of 2.5 million bike trips.
They studied the effects on ridership of station accessibility, or how far the commuter must walk to reach the station, and bike-availability, or the likelihood of finding a bike at the station. By taking these commuter preferences into account, the central Paris bike-share system could increase ridership by 29.4 percent.
“A key reason people aren’t using the self-service bikes as much as they could is that operators have focused on the bike design and the technology,” said Belavina. “There is almost no rigorous analysis of operational aspects, such as station location, and what motivates commuters to seek out or avoid renting a public ride-share bike.”