Bike-Share Systems: Accessibility and Availability

The cities of Paris, London, Chicago, and New York (among others) have recently launched large-scale bike-share systems to facilitate the use of bicycles for urban commuting. This paper estimates the relationship between aspects of bike-share system design and ridership. Specifically, we estimate the effects on ridership of station accessibility (how far the commuter must walk to reach a station) and of bike-availability (the likelihood of finding a bike at the station). Our analysis is based on a structural demand model that considers the random-utility maximizing choices of spatially distributed commuters, and it is estimated using highfrequency system-use data from the bike-share system in Paris. The role of station accessibility is identified using cross-sectional variation in station location and high -frequency changes in commuter choice sets; bike-availability effects are identified using longitudinal variation. Because the scale of our data, (in particular the high-frequency changes in choice sets) render traditional numerical estimation techniques infeasible, we develop a novel transformation of our estimation problem: from the time domain to the “station stockout state” domain. We find that a 10% reduction in distance traveled to access bike-share stations (about 13 meters) can increase system-use by 6.7% and that a 10% increase in bikeavailability can increase system-use by nearly 12%. Finally, we use our estimates to develop a calibrated counterfactual simulation demonstrating that the bike-share system in central Paris would have 29.41% more ridership if its station network design had incorporated our estimates of commuter preferences—with no additional spending on bikes or docking points.