Is the London Cycle Hire Scheme becoming more inclusive? An evaluation of the shifting spatial distribution of uptake based on 70 million trips

Robin Lovelace, Roger Beecham, Eva Heinen, Eugeni Vidal Tortosa, Yuanxuan Yang, Chris Slade and Antonia Roberts

Transportation Research Part A: Policy and Practice, 2020, vol. 140, issue C, 1-15

Abstract: Pro-cycling interventions, and cycle hire schemes in particular, are often assumed to primarily benefit the privileged. This framing has played-out in academic research, with many papers exploring the relationship between cycling and existing inequalities. A growing body of evidence suggests that cycle hire schemes tend to serve wealthy areas and young, high income groups, mirroring inequalities in other types of cycling uptake, yet there has been little research into the ‘direction of travel’ and whether such inequalities are growing or ‘levelling up’ over time. This paper explores the uptake of the London Cycle Hire Scheme (LCHS), a large, early and prominent scheme that had the explicit aim of ‘normalising’ cycling. The method involved reproducible analysis (with code documented in the GitHub repo Robinlovelace/cycle-hire-inclusive) of 73.4 million cycle high records spanning 8 years from January 2012 to December 2019, using the geographic location of docking stations alongside official statistics to assess social and spatial inequalities in uptake.

Keywords: Cycle hire; Bikeshare; Transport equity; Big data; Reproducible data science (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.tra.2020.07.017

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