Closing the Cycling Gap: Examining Equity Implications of Montreal’s Bikesharing Network Growth

Abstract

The worldwide growth of bike-sharing systems demonstrates their mass appeal and success. Montreal’s bike-sharing system, BIXI, opened in 2009, is now one of the largest in the world, and has drastically expanded since being taken over by the City of Montreal in 2014. The system now has over 750 stations up from 459 in 2014. This paper analyzes BIXI’s expansion through the lens of equity, revealing how factors including race and income can explain its growth. First, we mapped high-need equity areas that BIXI could have plausibly expanded to, and those that BIXI actually expanded to. We then created a logistic regression model with dissemination areas that gained new access to BIXI as the dependent variable, and income, race, the number of nearby trips, the population count, and the number of bus stops as independent explanatory variables, and controlled for distance from existing stations. Our regression findings demonstrated that race and income were statistically significant in explaining BIXI’s expansion, with a general trend that BIXI was expanding into lower-income neighborhoods and neighborhoods with a greater proportion of visible minorities, as defined by Statistics Canada. Finally, we compared the same explanatory variables in areas that had gained access to BIXI stations, and those in areas that had not but plausibly could have to show the socioeconomic differences in areas gaining new access to service.