A Study Analyzing Bike Share Program Data for Richmond, Virginia Found E-Bikes Were Generally Associated with Longer Trip Distances, Shorter Trip Times, and Higher Speeds Over Traditional Ones.
Richmond, Virginia, United States
E-Bikes’ Effect on Mode and Route Choice: A Case Study of Richmond, VA Bike Share
Summary Information
Due to benefits including the reduced transportation costs, improved health, and lower emissions, bicycles have become an increasingly popular mode of transportation in many cities. This study offered a comprehensive descriptive analysis, origin-destination trip analysis, and user cluster analysis to highlight the similarities and differences between pedal electric cycles (pedelecs) and traditional bicycles in Richmond, Virginia. The research also examined how membership type and other user characteristics may influence bike share usage. GPS data from a docked bike-share system in Richmond, Virginia was utilized from March 2019, when the Richmond, Virginia (RVA) Bike Share program began to transition from traditional bicycles to e-bikes. As of 2021, the program had 220 bikes available, including both traditional and pedelec, across 19 stations in central Richmond.
METHODOLOGY
To account for lost GPS signal in areas with tall buildings, the study used a map matching Application Programming Interface (API) to retrieve a list of street segments cycled, which snapped fuzzy, inaccurate GPS traces to actual segments in the road network. Internally, the API used the map-matching algorithm that determined the most likely street segment in the network represented by the collected GPS location data. The study then broke the snapped roads into segments and queried each segment in street maps to identify the road types. The dataset utilized in the study contained a total of 3,519 trips (2,257 pedelec and 1,262 traditional bicycle trips), collected during the first week of each month from April 2019 to December 2019.
FINDINGS
- The results considering all trips revealed that pedelecs were generally associated with longer trip distances, shorter trip times, higher speeds and lower elevations.
- Specifically, the study results showed that bikers were able to cycle about 21.8 percent farther using pedelecs compared to traditional bikes (2.91 miles vs 2.39 miles).
- Travel times on pedelecs were about 13 percent lower than that of traditional bikes (30.7 minutes vs 35.3 minutes).
- This study also showed that the bikers using pedelecs were about 38 percent faster than the traditional bikes (6.5 mph vs 4.7 mph), and as a result trip times tend to be shorter.
