Exploring the relationship between built environment and bike-sharing demand: Does the trip length matter?

Over the past decade, bike-sharing has garnered significant attention in both research and practice. As a manpower-driven transportation mode, the usage of bikes seems more sensitive to trip length, since one could take a shared bike to a destination where is too far to walk, or choose it for simply replacing walking when going to a nearby place. This paper identifies a threshold of bike-sharing trip lengths from bike-sharing trace data, and employs the Semiparametric Geographically Weighted Poisson Regression model to investigate the relationship between built environment and bike-sharing demand with different lengths by considering the heterogeneity in the relationship. Results show that built environment has heterogeneous effects on the bike-sharing demand in urban areas, and the effects differ across groups with trip lengths. The findings contribute to understanding the relationships between built environment and bike-sharing demand, and providing support for the placements and dispatching of shared bikes.