Title Estimating public bicycle users’ willingness-to-accept bikes pick-up from or return to other stations – A case study of YouBike in Taipei
Year 2018
Degree Master
School Department of Transportation and Logistics Management National Chiao Tung University
Author
Summary Practically, the most common approach adopted by system operators to deal with the spatial imbalance of the fleet in bike-sharing systems is sending trucks to stations to relocate empty trucks so as to balance the supply and demand in these systems. This type of fleet rebalancing approach is passive and incurs significant operating costs to system operators. This study considers an alternative that operators can utilize real- time information to identify problematic stations which will run out of bike or stand inventory in a short time and guide (or suggest) users to pick up bikes from or return bikes to nearby stations with sufficient bikes or stands, respectively, by providing users with price discount incentives. This is a proactive approach that may prevent some stations from running of bikes or stands in advance and reduce the operating cost for system operators on relocating empty bikes.In order to understanding users’ willingness to accept (WTA) operators’ suggestion of pickup or return stations given price discount incentives, this study adopts the stated preference approach to design scenarios in the questionnaire, and conduct a survey to collect data from YouBike users in Taipei to investigates the users’ WTA prices under different scenarios. We also establish and estimate disaggregate choice models to examine the impact of model parameters on the users’ WTA prices. The results show that the WTA price discounts, estimated using Probit and Logit models, are between 30% and 40% of the original prices under different scenarios. The findings of this research will help shared-mobility system operators design effective price discount incentive mechanisms, if system operators intend to adopt this proactive incentive-based approach to facilitate their fleet rebalancing in the future.
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