Understanding the Modal Shift in Response to Bike-sharing Systems in the City of Delft
The introduction of bike-sharing systems has revitalized cycling in many cities around the world. In general, the bike-sharing systems operated worldwide can be divided into two categories: docked bike-sharing and dockless bike-sharing. In the docked bike-sharing system, users have to rent bicycles from designated docking stations and then return them to the available lockers in the docking stations. The dockless bike-sharing system is designed to provide more freedom and flexibility to travellers in terms of bicycle accessibility. In contrast to docked bike-sharing, riders are free to leave bicycles in both physical and geo-fencing designated parking areas provided in public space with or without bicycle racks.
As a greener travel mode, bike-sharing is competitive in short distance travel and people who have long commuting distance are more likely to choose public transit integration with it. Previous research has shown that bike-sharing reduces car and taxi useage and increases cycling in almost every city. Bike-sharing system has been shown to reduce trip demand of public transportation including train, metro and bus.
In Delft as a student city in the Netherlands, cycling is seen as the most important mode of transport within the city. There exist three different bike-sharing schemes in operations, including OV-fiets, Mobike and Swapfiets. OV-fiets was introduced in the Netherlands in 2003 [4]. The bicycles should always be brought back to the location where the rental started. At this moment, there are almost 300 rental locations consisting of 20500 bicycles. Mobike is a dockless bike-sharing service and is more flexible than the existing docked bike-sharing alternative. Mobike extended the operations to Delft in March 2018 with a focus on the university campus. Swapfiets, launched in 2014, is a bicycle-rental system on a subscription basis, can be used for regular private trips. Now it has over 50,000 customers in 38 cities in Europe. The coexistence of different bike-sharing schemes in Delft enables this city to be a test bed for bike-sharing research.
This paper aims to understand the modal shift dynamics and the factors influence travellers’ choices in response to different bike-sharing systems by conducting a survey targeting OV-fiets users, Mobike users and Swapfiets users and private-bike users.
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