Who benefits most from Lyon’s bike sharing system?

Abstract

Bike sharing systems (BSS) have been growing fast all over the world, along with the number of articles analyzing such systems. However the lack of databases at the individual level and covering several years has limited the analysis of BSS users’ behavior in the long term. This article gives a first detailed description of the temporal evolution of individual customers. Using a 5-year dataset covering 120,827 distinct year-long subscribers, we show the heterogeneous individual trajectories masked by the overall system stability. Users follow two main trajectories: about half remain in the system for at most one year, showing a low median activity (47 trips); the remaining half corresponds to more active users (median activity of 91 trips in their first year) that remain continuously active for several years (mean time = 2.9 years). We show that users from urban cores, middle-aged and male are over represented among these long-term users, which profit most from the BSS. This provides further support for the view that BSS mostly benefit the already privileged.