Bikesharing Saves DC Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars

In November of 2016, a study explored how much bikesharing impacted congestion. This study — Bicycle infrastructure, and traffic congestion: Evidence from DC’s Capital Bikeshare — found that Capital Bikeshare cut neighborhood traffic congestion by ~4%.

Previously, some people had implied that the bicyclists using Capital Bikeshare came for a group of former pedestrians and metro travelers, so didn’t really replace automobile traffic. In this way, bicycles may have even added to the congestion. This recent study by Timothy L. Hamilton and Casey J. Wichman supports the opposite — bikesharing brought people out of cars and cut congestion.

“Empirical results suggest that the availability of a bike-share reduces traffic congestion upwards of 4% within a neighborhood.”

Streetsblog.org emphasizes: “That may not sound like a big number, but it can result in some pretty significant benefits. The authors write: ‘This would reduce annual congestion costs for Washington area automobile commuters by approximately $57 per commuter, and total costs by $182 million. In terms of social benefits, a 4% reduction in traffic congestion for our study area would imply an annual benefit of roughly $1.28 million from reductions in congestion-induced CO2 emissions.'”

However, even those benefits are conservative. Wash Cycle contends: “This value ignores any benefits from cleaner air (like NOx emissions), private cost-savings from mode-switching and any health benefits that may accrue to bicycle commuters. They also found that congestion mitigation occurs primarily in areas with relatively high congestion and that there was actually almost no spillover effect.”

All in all, in this case at least, bikesharing has apparently had a tremendously positive effect on the areas of DC where it was implemented.

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Image by thisisbossi

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