Differences in bike-sharing usage among varying demographic groups and its association with station-surrounding characteristics in Tartu, Estonia

Abstract

The bike share system offers a wide range of benefits to promote human mobility. However, many bike share systems favor particular demographic groups (e.g., younger people and males), suggesting that the resulting benefits are not equally distributed among the public. To this end, the goal of this thesis is to empirically examine the differences in bike-sharing usage among varying demographic groups and its association with station-surrounding characteristics (i.e., land use, transport infrastructure, and population distribution) in Tartu, Estonia. For doing so, non-parametric tests (i.e., the Mann-Whitney U test and the Kruskal-Wallis H test) and the hot spot analysis were conducted to investigate the gender-based and age-based differences in bike-sharing usage; an explainable machine learning regression algorithm (i.e., gradient boosting decision trees) was used to examine the complex relationships between station-surrounding characteristics and bike-sharing usage by eight demographic groups. The findings suggest that bike-sharing usage varied among eight demographic groups in general; bike-sharing usage by varying demographic groups was differently influenced by various station-surrounding characteristics. The floor area ratio and the proportion of commercial land played the most important role in increasing bike-sharing usage. Other relative important characteristics included the proportion of public land, bike lanes, the number of foreigner residents, and population composition. Especially, it found that bike lanes were of particular concern to female users due to road safety issues; the population distribution of senior residents around bike stations played a particularly important role in increasing their use of the bike share system when compared to other age groups. These findings can provide the bike share system owner with significant insights into interventions for increasing bike-sharing usage of groups with specific demographics, so that inclusivity and equity in urban transportation could be promoted.