Bicycle - Transit Integration in the United States , 2001 – 2009

This paper analyzes the recent trend in bicycle-transit integration in the U.S. It reviews data from the National Household Travel Surveys (NHTS) to show the characteristics of bicycle-transit integrated trips, where the integrators were from, and to which population groups the integrators belonged. Bicycle-transit integration was increasingly observed in commuters and younger travelers, and became more imbalanced by gender. Results indicate the rise in socio-economic diversity of bicycle-transit integrators, despite a racial gap. There was a clear concentration of bicycle-transit integrators in large and high-density urban areas, where most transit users lived. Evidence does not support that rail attracts more bike access/egress trips than bus. More transit users used bicycles to access/egress in the Pacific, East North Central, and Mountain regions. Given the non-trivial role of bicycles compared to transit in the U.S., the focus on bicycle use and the marriage between bicycle and transit should be further emphasized. Introduction As concerns about the efficiency of public transit, public health, energy supply, and climate change have risen in recent decades, U.S. policy makers have shifted from a highway-centric framework to a multimodal transportation system, which encourages the use of public transit and, increasingly, non-motorized modes. However, both transit and non-motorized modes provide limited mobility and accessibility to users. The maximum feasible travel distance of bicycling makes wide use of this Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2013 96 mode impossible in U.S. cities, which have been designed largely for automobiles. Transit can reach a much longer distance, but transit services cannot stretch to every corner of an urban area. Therefore, current shares of bicycle and transit trips in U.S. cities are quite low compared to many foreign cities in the developed world. Foreign experience has shown that the benefits of bicycle and transit travel are greater when combined (e.g., Replogle 1984, 1992). Since 53 percent of all people nationwide live less than 2 miles from the closest transit facility and 2 miles is likely accepted as a feasible riding distance by most cyclists, there is great potential for bicycle-transit integration to increase bicycle and transit use (FHWA 1994). The private and social benefits of bicycle-transit integration include increasing transit ridership by enlarging transit’s catchment area (through solving the first/last-mile problem), improving cyclists’ mobility by overcoming distance, topographical, weather, safety, and infrastructure barriers, lowering the necessary investment in park-and-ride facilities, and reducing air pollution and traffic congestion (TRB 1994, 2005). The federal Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991 and the subsequent Transportation Equity Act for the 21st Century (TEA-21) of 1998 enabled many state and local authorities to conduct planning studies, programs, and projects linking bicycles and transit in the 1990s. TEA-21 further encouraged bicycle-transit integration by allowing the federal share of transit enhancement grants that link bicycles and transit to reach 95 percent, instead of the usual 80 percent for transit enhancement activities (FTA 1999). As a result, since the 1990s, there has been significant growth in bicycle-transit integration in the U.S. In the early 1990s, bicycletransit integration consisted mainly of bicycle parking. By the mid-2000s, a range of bicycle services (e.g., mounting bicycle racks on buses, allowing bicycles to board trains, installing bicycle racks and lockers at transit stations, and providing staffed bicycle parking facilities at major transit hubs) were offered by agencies of all sizes in many parts of the U.S. (TRB 2005). This study provides one of the earliest evaluations of the status and trends of bicycle-transit integration in the U.S. Using the National Household Travel Surveys (NHTS) data, it describes the recent changes in using bicycles to access/egress transit and how the behavior of bicycle-transit integration relates to the characteristics of trips, geography, and travelers. Section Two of this paper reviews the existing literature, in particular empirical evidence, on bicycle-transit integration. Section Three describes data and methodology, followed by results and discussions presented in Section Four. Section Five concludes the paper with suggestions for policy makers and researchers. Bicycle-Transit Integration in the United States, 2001–2009 97 Literature Perhaps due to the marginality of combining cycling and transit in North America, there is a shortage of reliable data and empirical studies on bicycle-transit integration (Bachand-Marleau et al. 2011). For example, as of 2005, few transit agencies had collected detailed data about bicycle-on-transit rider characteristics or bicycle parking use (TRB 2005). Hindered by the lack of boarding counts, Hagelin (2005) was unable to provide a meaningful cost-benefit analysis of bike-on-bus programs in Florida. Most of the existing empirical analyses on bicycle-transit integration are descriptive and use data from Western Europe (Givoni and Rietveld 2007; Martens 2004, 2007; Pucher and Buehler 2009, 2012; Rietveld 2000). Martens (2004, 2007) examined the bicycle-transit integration experiences of European countries and cities, including places with relatively high shares (27% in the Netherlands and 26% in Copenhagen), medium shares (13% in Munich), and low shares (2% in the UK) of bicycles in transit access. The majority of bike-andride trips were made for commuting purposes (work and education). Most users traveled under six kilometers to a public transit stop, with longer access distances reported for faster transit modes. Across all locations, except the UK, regional transit (e.g., train, suburban rail, and express bus) had higher shares of bicycle access than local transit (e.g., city bus, metro rail). For Dutch rail transit riders, bicycle use for transit access/egress decreased with the level of urbanization—highest in suburban areas, followed by medium-sized cities and large towns, and lowest in main cities. In addition, there was an imbalance between Dutch transit riders’ homeand activity-end shares of bicycle use. For work, education, and shopping transit trips, bicycle use at the home-end was much higher than at the activity-end. Also, Martens found that choosing to use a combination of bicycle and train did not seem to be associated with the availability of a car, but car availability was clearly correlated with the levels of bike-and-ride for slower modes of transit. Givoni and Rietveld (2007) found that most of the surveyed Dutch rail passengers chose walking, bicycling, and public transport to get to or from rail stations. From 1978 to 2005, walking, cycling, and transit dominated access to home-end rail stations, while walking and transit dominated access at the activity-end rail stations. Similar to Martens (2004), they found that the availability of a car did not correlate with the mode choice to access the stations. The bicycle was used much more often at the home-end than at the activity-end for transit access/egress, while the opposite held for walking and transit. Walking and bicycling were both used more often for station access distances under, rather than above, three kilometers. Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2013 98 By compiling data from 150 on-board vehicle passenger survey datasets (more than 496,000 public transit riders sampled in total) conducted by public transportation agencies from 2000 to 2005, the American Public Transportation Association (APTA 2007) found that the primary means of transit access and egress was walking (59.6% for access and 63.8% for egress). The second most common mode of public transit access and egress was transferring from another transit vehicle, accounting for 17.2 percent and 21.6 percent of access and egress trips, respectively. Automobiles and other private vehicles accounted for 21.0 percent and 12.0 percent of access and egress trips, respectively. The bicycle was combined in the “other access/ egress modes” group, totaling 2.2 percent and 2.6 percent of access and egress, respectively. These results are consistent with the Transit Performance Monitoring System (TPMS) reports, the other major U.S. source on transit access and egress. Data from 58 surveys conducted from 1996 to 2003 suggest that the dominant access/egress modes were walking, transit, and automobile. On the other hand, the bicycle was combined in the “other access/egress modes” group, totaling 0.6–1.3 percent of access and 1.1–1.5 percent of egress (APTA 2007). Only a small number of studies provide more in-depth analysis of bicycle-transit integration behavior. Using a nested logit model, Debrezion et al. (2009) studied the joint access mode and railway station choices of Dutch railway users. They found a steeper negative distance effect on the utility of accessing departure stations by walking and bicycle, compared to car and public transport. Availability of parking spaces and bicycle standing areas had a positive effect on the choice of accessing departure railway stations by car and bicycle. Through analyzing access to railway stations’ effect on rail use, Brons et al. (2009) found that in Dutch cities, improving the infrastructure network for access and expanding access services to the railway station can substitute for improving and expanding the services provided in the rail network, and were probably more cost effective for increasing rail use. Bachand-Marleau et al. (2011) analyzed online survey data to identify current or potential groups of bicycle-transit integrators in the region of Montreal, Canada. Bringing a bicycle on transit was the preferred form of integration by the survey respondents, although they were likely to use bicycle parking or a public bicycle more regularly. Using on-board survey data, Bergman et al. (2011) analyzed the access mode choice by riders of the newly-constructed Westside Express Service (WES), a suburb-to-suburb commuter rail in the Portland, Oregon, metropolitan area. They found the importance of pro-sustainability attitudes in choosing bike access and strong access mode choice effects of feeder bus lines and parking proviBicycle-Transit Integration in the United States, 2001–2009 99 sion in station area. Assessing the costs and cyclists’ preferences of four common bicycle and transit integration strategies (i.e., bike on transit, bike to transit, two bike—one for access and one for egress—and shared bike) in five communities, Krizek and Stonebraker (2011) suggested that cyclists mostly preferred transit with bicycles aboard but the growth potential of bike on transit was limited. Enhancing bicycle parking at transit stops proved most cost-effective, although security was an important concern for cyclists. In general, it seems that in-depth and rigorous analysis of bicycle-transit integration in the U.S. needs more reliable empirical evidence. Furthermore, almost all of the statistics on bicycle-transit integration reported in the existing literature are not accompanied with standard errors. Due to the small mode shares of transit and bicycle (not to mention the share of bicycle-transit integrated trips) and the limited sample sizes in most analyses, omitting standard errors is extremely problematic. Research Design To describe patterns and progress in bicycle-transit integration in the U.S., this study relies mainly on the recent NHTS in 2001 (Version 4.0, July 2005) and 2009 (Version 2.1, February 2011), which provide detailed information on the access/ egress modes of transit riders. Information from earlier national travel surveys in 1983, 1990, and 1995 were used to provide a longer time series of trends in transit and bicycle usage. Total number of day trip observations increased from 45.3 thousand in 1983 to 149.5 thousand in 1990, 409 thousand in 1995, 642.3 thousand in 2001, and 1.17 million in 2009. We focus on the surveys’ day trip data, which were collected in a 24-hour period. The purposes (types) of trips include home-based work (HBW), home-based shopping (HBS), home-based social/recreational (HBSR), other home-based (OHB), and not home-based (NHB). This study analyzes the most commonly-used transit: local public transit buses, commuter buses, commuter train, subway/metro rail, and streetcar/trolley. Other public transportation modes such as school/charter/tour/ intercity bus, hotel/airport shuttle, taxi, Amtrak, airplane, or passenger line/ferry are excluded from this analysis unless otherwise specified. All reported statistics are weighted using household level weights adjusted for nonresponse in the datasets. Whenever possible, statistical variances are calculated and 95 percent confidence intervals (CI) are reported using jackknife replicate weights. Journal of Public Transportation, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2013