Bikesharing and equity: A nationwide study of bikesharing accessibility in the U.S.

Keywords: bikesharing, shared micromobility, transportation equity, accessibility, GAMM
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Bikesharing has gained popularity globally as a sustainable and healthy mobility option in the past decade. There has been a growing concern that the benefits of bikesharing have not been equitably distributed across geographic areas and social groups. This study is conducted to assess bikesharing equity at the census block group level in 73 U.S. cities as of July 2022 with a non-parametric generalized additive mixed model (GAMM). Our findings show that bikesharing accessibility is equitable in terms of its favourable treatment of zero-vehicle communities. However, Bikesharing accessibility is inequitable in terms of its unfavourable treatment of communities with high levels of deprivation and high concentration of minorities, females, youth, and senior populations. These results indicate that future bikesharing equity programs should prioritize expanding bikesharing service areas into underserved disadvantaged communities through installing new stations or transforming into hybrid systems. In addition, our results suggest that Area Deprivation Index scores over 80 and shares of minorities over 70% could be used as the thresholds to identify disadvantaged communities, and gender inequality should also be taken into consideration in equitable transportation planning.