Bike-Sharing Adoption in Cross-National Contexts: An Empirical Research on the Factors Affecting Users’ Intentions

Abstract

Due to the need to promote a larger scale of low-carbon commuting, it is important to identify the influencing factors of the users’ intentions in the adoption of sharing bikes. For studying bike-sharing adoption in cross-national contexts, this research establishes a new model. By conducting multi-group structural equation modeling (SEM), the influencing factors of the adoption in China and Estonia are identified, respectively. Meanwhile, the moderation effects of the national context on several influencing factors are confirmed, and this result indicates that the contexts for bike-sharing adoption are different in the two countries. Two factors have also been found, namely the availability of infrastructure and the beneficial cost, for which policy interventions could have a significant impact in China but not in Estonia. Thus, more active policy interventions might lead to a higher level of adoption intention for the Chinese. This finding provides the implication that implementing policy interventions could be critical for accelerating the adoption of bike sharing and promoting low-carbon commuting.