Understanding bike-sharing usage patterns of members and casual users: A case study in New York City

Abstract

Shared bicycle travel has become an important travel mode for urban residents, and bike-sharing platforms are also booming in major cities worldwide. The bike-sharing platform provides users with systematic services: members refer to annual bike-sharing service subscribers and casual users refer to holders of a day pass or single ride ticket. Even though casual users account for a large share of ridership and revenue at bike-share systems in New York City (NYC), very little is known about the characteristics and preferences of casual users and how they compare to members. Based on the open-docked bike-sharing dataset from Citi Bike, we analyze the bike usage patterns of members and casual users in NYC, and how these patterns change in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic on a typical day level. We find that the COVID-19 pandemic has negatively influenced members' bike trip counts on weekdays; bike travel time increases for members during the pandemic and decreases for casual users after the pandemic. To make a profound study concerning spatial heterogeneities, we employ Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to cluster the spatiotemporal changes of the station-level bike usage and obtain four clusters for each user type. Combined with the Points of Interest (POI) information, we find that member-related cluster with commuting POIs is significantly affected by the pandemic, while leisure trips are the most severely affected for casual users. Compared with the central area, peripheral clusters with residential and religious POIs are less affected by the pandemic. According to our findings, new operational strategies such as flexible subscriptions can be developed to attract more users, maintain their stickiness, and improve the bike-sharing level of services.