Ride Substitution Using Electric Bike Sharing: Feasibility, Cost, and Carbon Analysis
summary
Analysis uses 19M CityBike trips and 354M taxi trips from NYC and a linear optimization that assigns regular bikes to short rides and e-bikes to longer ones. Findings: median taxi trip is 2.7 km, 70% of trips start within 200 m of a station, biking is faster for ≤2 km, and substituting 1% of car trips needs about 10,000 bikes per 1% substitution with sub-linear scaling (doubling trips → +52% bikes). A 10% substitution cuts carbon by 6.6% and a hybrid fleet needs only ~25% e-bikes.
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