A Comparison in Travel Characteristics of Bike-Sharing between College Students and Office Workers Based on Theory of Planned Behavior

Abstract

As an important component of bike-sharing (BS) users, the travel behavior of college students and office workers is important to the promotion of BS within Chinese cities. To explore the influencing factors for the behavioral intentions of BS, this paper makes a different analysis between the two groups. Based on the theory of planned behavior, and using environmental awareness as an extended variable, a BS travel intention model was developed. A total of 676 valid questionnaires were collected and analyzed from college students and office workers in Zhengzhou. The results indicate that attitude, subjective norms, perceived behavior control, and environmental awareness have a positive impact on the behavioral intentions of BS. However, the influence degree of each variable is different between the two groups. Perceived behavior control, including travel time, travel cost, and cycling difficulty, has the greatest impact on BS behavioral intention for college students. Meanwhile, subjective norms, including policy and media publicity, has the most significant impact on BS behavioral intention for office workers. The impact of environmental awareness on college students’ use of BS is higher than that of office workers. We also found that undergraduates use BS more frequently than postgraduates. The findings provide the clear influence factors on behavioral intentions of BS between college students and office workers, that can help policy optimization in terms of bike-sharing systems, giving some suggestion for an approach devoted to deepen the individual-context interactions