Thirteenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

As a low-carbon travel mode, bicycling has drawn increasing political interest in the contemporary Chinese urban context and the public sharing bikes have become the most popular option. This research explores the spatial-temporal relationship between sharing-bike usage and different characteristics of urban street built-environment. The sharing-bike usage data in the research includes a total of 1.09 million samples that are the entire sharing-bike distribution data recorded in 2 days in 2018 within a neighborhood of 152 hectors in Wuhan,China. These data are assigned to the 78 urban street segments in this area based on their geographic location. The built-environment variables used in this research are categorized into three sections: 1)street design characteristics; 2)condition of other public transportation; 3)land use characteristics that are described by the categories and density of the point of interest (POI) along the segments. Robust Geographically Weighted Regression (GWR) models are used to reveal the relationships of specific urban streets built-environment characteristics and the likelihood of sharing-bike usage. The results show a statistically strong association s between bike sharing usage and several different built-environment characteristics such as POI density and traffic facilities. It also shows that the pattern that bike sharing usage are influenced by built-environment characteristics depends on the period within the day. These findings may be useful for policy makers and urban designers to better understand the factors of bike sharing systems and thus propose guidance and strategies for urban street planning and design in order to promote the use of sharing bikes.