Research on the Bike-Sharing Service from the Users’ Perspective and Its Impacts on Their Lifestyles

Abstract

Shared bicycles have brought new challenges to the urban environment while facilitating the mobility of residents. The main manifestations are the chaos of urban management and the damage to the city’s landscape. The literature points out that governments, enterprises, and the urban environment should collaborate to help to improve the bike-sharing system from different aspects such as policy management, operation, maintenance, and public supervision. However, very few pieces of literature investigate the service from users’ perspective or what is the impact of the service on their lives. Combined with field surveys and literature studies, I randomly selected 10 users around the Siping campus of Tongji University for questionnaire interviews. The results show that people are satisfied with the bike-sharing service and its corresponding environment. The biggest pain points are inconsistency and unsafe while riding. The bike system and the urban environment match well in public spaces, but the residential areas and the working places need to be improved. Sharing bikes increase people’s willingness to travel within short distances and enhance social interaction. Last not least, bike-sharing users are more concerned with the urban environment and are more likely to accept the green traveling lifestyle. Finally, I proposed strategies and recommendations based on environmental policy, planning, design and education aiming to integrate users, service system and urban environments.