North America's First E-Bikeshare

Abstract

The integration of electric bicycles (e-bikes) with bikesharing could increase the utility of bikesharing through a reduction of some barriers to bicycling and an increase in the number of prospective users. North America's first e-bikesharing system (cycleUshare) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, offers a new, sustainable transportation option for students, faculty, and staff. The cycleUshare system with two stations was launched as a small pilot project to study the technology and its users' experiences. This paper presents an overview of the cycleUshare system and reports experiences from the first year of operation. With 93 enrolled users, cycleUshare provided a unique opportunity to study not only the system's use but how individual users made trips with both regular bicycles and e-bikes and the factors that influenced those trips. The study reported here found that only 22% of users accounted for 81% of the trips. Factors of speed and convenience played major roles in participants' decisions to use the system, and speed and comfort were the most influential factors in the selection of an e-bike rather than a regular bicycle. Most of the reported trips were class related, although e-bikes were used for a wide variety of trip purposes. Walking was the mode most displaced by the system; this result indicated that e-bikesharing expanded user mobility. User perceptions about bicycle types were explored also. This model of e-bikeshare was effective in its capability to attract users to both regular bicycles and e-bikes and to expand user mobility.