Cycling Research Board Annual Meeting

Equitable access to essential destinations remains a persistent challenge, as one in nine Dutch residents sometimes has difficulty reaching work, education, healthcare, or supermarkets. In urban outskirts, accessibility deficiency is particularly pronounced due to dispersed land use and fragmented active mobility networks. Shared bikes are often proposed as inclusive accessibility solutions. However, shared bike users are not representative of society, with an overrepresentation of young, higher-income, and male users. To understand whether shared bikes can reduce accessibility deficiency, a bottom-up approach is needed. Although top-down approaches are more common, the aggregated data leaves out important details. The person-based bottom-up approach can uncover barriers to shared-bike use and assess whether overcoming these barriers can reduce accessibility deficiency.
This study investigates the relationship between shared-bike enablers, the capability to use a shared bike, and accessibility deficiency. Enablers are the opposite of a barrier, creating the opportunity to use a shared bike. Capabilities are calculated based on enabling resources (e.g., bike ownership) and enabling conversion factors (e.g., safety perception, cycling skills, technological literacy). Regression analyses quantify the relationship between these calculated capabilities and accessibility deficiency. Semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and participatory workshops provide qualitative insights, connecting calculated metrics to residents’ lived experiences and perceptions of shared-bike solutions.
This research makes two contributions. First, it contributes to equitable mobility planning by revealing the potential role of shared bikes in reducing accessibility deficiency. Second, it contributes methodologically by operationalising the Capability Approach as a person-based, sufficiency-focused measure of accessibility. By combining person-based models with participatory qualitative methods, this research offers a nuanced and human-centred perspective on mobility planning.