Built Environment Factors Affecting Bike Sharing Ridership: Data-Driven Approach for Multiple Cities

Identification of factors influencing ridership is necessary for policy-making, as well as, when examining transferability and aspects of performance and reliability. In this work, a data-driven method is formulated to correlate arrivals and departures of station-based bike sharing systems with built environment factors in multiple cities. Ridership data from stations of multiple cities are pooled in one data set regardless of their geographic boundaries. The method bundles the collection, analysis, and processing of data, as well as, the model's estimation using statistical and machine learning techniques. The method was applied on a national level in six cities in Germany, and also on an international level in three cities in Europe and North America. The results suggest that the model's performance did not depend on clustering cities by size but by the relative daily distribution of the rentals. Selected statistically significant factors were identified to vary temporally (e.g., nightclubs were significant during the night). The most influencing variables were related to the city population, distance to city center, leisure-related establishments, and transport-related infrastructure. This data-driven method can help as a support decision-making tool to implement or expand bike sharing systems.