Conditioning factors for bike sharing successful evolution. The case of BiciMAD

Abstract

Bike sharing systems (BSS) have gained great acceptance in many cities arround the world. Since the deployment of the first system, many cities promote the public bike not only as a sustainable mode of transportation, but also as a way to make visible the use of bicycles in urban environments. Four generations of BSS with great advances in between are recognized. BiciMAD in Madrid is one example of the last generation. A system deployed in mid-2014 with 1,560 bicycles and 123 stations. During the early stage, TRANSyT-UPM conducted a series of studies to identify the intention of use, before the system deployment, and the user satisfaction and the relation between the use intention and real adoption, after the deployment. Since the last study in 2016, the system experienced some substantial changes and improvements in order to subsist. Now that the system has reached its maturity, we conducted a survey in May of 2019, to study the evolution in the user satisfaction with the main factors that conditioned the success of BiciMAD. We asked subscribers, occasional users and non-users about their satisfaction with the elements of the system obtaining over 6,500 valid responses. First, we compare the results obtained in previous surveys (2015 and 2016) with the latest, in order to identify changes in user profile and the conditioning factors for bike-sharing use. Our results suggest that there are external and internal characteristics of the system that made it successful. For instance, the electric pedaling assistance is an attribute positively valuated that make user consider the streets slope unimportant. Also, the system had achieved some important goals, such as reduce the total trips in private car of the subscribers and not deterring users from walking.