Investigation of private and public bikes usage patterns considering GPS trajectory based cycling features

Abstract

Understanding bike usage patterns is essential for increasing bike demand, evaluating the effectiveness of bike facilities, and improving the quality of the bike system. This study aims to identify factors that influence bike usage for zone-based departure and arrival trips. It also seeks to address knowledge gaps by comparing private and dock-based public bikes, as well as use on weekdays and weekends. This study employed GPS trajectory data from 12,106 private bikes and 29,776 dock-based public bikes over one week in Seoul, South Korea. The dataset comprises zone-based physical characteristics and cycling patterns for 19,153 census zones. To tackle the problem of excessive zero values for bike demand in many zones, zero-inflated negative binomial models were employed for analysis. The findings suggested that realized detours, arising from natural barriers and a lack of infrastructure, are associated with a reduction in arrival trips on weekends but an increase in departure trips on weekdays. Behavioral detours, linked to route preferences, tended to decrease usage of public bikes on weekdays. Departure and arrival trips increased in districts with a higher level of mixed land use and larger commercial areas on weekdays. Moreover, bicyclists tended to prefer districts with longer separated bikeways, while bike usage was likely to decrease in districts with a high floating population and vehicle lanes. These findings provide valuable insights into cycling usage patterns and associated factors, encouraging more extensive use of bikes.