Potential User Profiles of Innovative Bike-Sharing Systems: The Case of BiciMAD (Madrid, Spain)

Abstract

The latest generation of bike-sharing, i.e. demand responsive multimodal systems are relatively new and highly innovative elements of urban mobility. Bike-sharing is also an emerging topic of urban transport and sustainable mobility related research. Due to its novelty, most scholars focus on the supply (repositioning problem, optimising the location of stations, pricing, etc.) and not the demand side problems (user behaviour and profiles, trip characteristics, etc.). The aim of this paper is (1) the analysis of the evolution of bike-sharing and the exploration of how innovative technologies have changed bike-sharing systems for users, (2) the review of cycling and bike-sharing related literature on user characteristics, and (3) the identification of user (and non-user) profiles of the latest generation of bike-sharing on the basis of an ex-ante case study on the BiciMAD system in Madrid, Spain.