Ride Substitution Using Electric Bike Sharing: Feasibility, Cost, and Carbon Analysis

While ride-sharing has emerged as a popular form of transportation in urban areas due to its on-demand convenience, it has become a major contributor to carbon emissions, with recent studies suggesting it is 47% more carbon-intensive than personal car trips. In this paper, we examine the feasibility, costs, and carbon benefits of using electric bike-sharing---a low carbon form of ride-sharing---as a potential substitute for shorter ride-sharing trips, with the overall goal of greening the ride-sharing ecosystem. Using public datasets from New York City, our analysis shows that nearly half of the taxi and rideshare trips in New York are shorts trips of less than 3.5km, and that biking is actually faster than using a car for ultra-short trips of 2km or less. We analyze the cost and carbon benefits of different levels of ride substitution under various scenarios. We find that the additional bikes required to satisfy increased demand from ride substitution increases sub-linearly and results in 6.6% carbon emission reduction for 10% taxi ride substitution. Moreover, this reduction can be achieved through a hybrid mix that requires only a quarter of the bikes to be electric bikes, which reduces system costs. We also find that expanding bike-share systems to new areas that lack bike-share coverage requires additional investments due to the need for new bike stations and bike capacity to satisfy demand but also provides substantial carbon emission reductions. Finally, frequent station repositioning can reduce the number of bikes needed in the system by up to a third for a minimal increase in carbon emissions of 2% from the trucks required to perform repositioning, providing an interesting tradeoff between capital costs and carbon emissions.