1. Questions
Bicycle parking research largely focuses on worksite parking, parking at transit stations, and the relationship between bicycle parking availability and bicycle use (Heinen and Buehler 2019). Most large travel surveys do not collect information on bicycle parking and no known studies focus on parking for e-bikes.
To influence the use of bicycling, authorities have mostly focused on providing cycling paths. This paper rather focuses on comparing the provision of bicycle parking and free car parking. Provision of free car parking stimulates car use (Shoup 2021) and deters from the goal of increasing sustainable travel modes. The comparison provides what we refer to as a sustainable mobility test for parking.
To assess whether parking offer is adequate with respect to trips completed by cyclists, three questions can support better planning of bicycle parking: 1) What types of destinations are the most likely to have (or not) bicycle parking available? 2) Do trips by e-bikes more frequently end with parking at destinations than trips made with regular bicycles? 3) Is the presence of bicycle parking at the destination as frequent as free car parking?
Evidence at a population level on each of these questions is scarce, suggesting the importance of collecting better data on bicycle parking. We expect free car parking to be more available than bicycle parking, and e-bike trips to be better served by destination parking, given the higher cost of such bicycles.
2. Methods
A randomly assigned sample of trip stages (n= 4,109 bicycle stages; n= 42,465 car stages) conducted by respondents of the 2021 national Swiss Mobility and Transport Microcensus (MTMC) (OFS and ARE, 2023) is used.
In this telephone survey, stages are defined as sections of trips conducted by a specific mode, thereby allowing respondents to declare trips using multiple modes. For bicycle and car trips, stages can involve a connection with public transport stations for the next section of the trip or cover the entire trip.
Stage purposes are identified using the question: “What did you do once you arrived at your destination?” The 13 categories of stage purpose were recoded to 7 categories (see Table 1). Because business trips and accompanying trips are far less frequent stages with too few values for analyses, they are grouped into a Other purpose category.
Respondents were randomly assigned to special sections. The “slow mobility” section included the presence of bicycle parking at the stage destination for those making bicycle stages. For car parking, respondents declaring a car stage as a driver or passenger were asked to declare car parking costs when the destination was not home or a border crossing and when they were 18 and over. Because parking was only asked when a car or bicycle trip was made, the survey does not support an evaluation of foregone trips due to lack of parking. Declared bicycle parking at border crossing and home destinations were omitted to match the car parking question.
The question on bike parking was: “Did you have designated spaces for parking/dropping off bikes at the stage destination?” In the codebook, the information “Interviewer instructions: provided by the owner” did not specify whether this was systematically provided to respondents and this addition can change the nature of responses. It is expected that all bicycle stages had some form of parking available at destinations. But bicyclists that declared no parking likely used “fly parking” such as mooring to street furniture, a sign of undersupply of bicycle parking (Aldred and Jungnickel 2013; Larsen 2015). The question on car parking was: “How much did you have to pay, in Swiss francs (CHF), to park your car at the destination (of the stage)?” Values for car parking were recoded to 3 categories, including free. Paid car parking categories are shown for reference.
We run Two-sample tests of proportions to compare proportions of use of bicycle parking to proportions of use of free car parking for declared stages by purpose and overall. The same tests are used to compare bicycle parking for regular and e-bike stages. We report on two-tailed tests with 95% confidence level. Survey weights are used for all analyses.
3. Findings
The bicyclist stage sample is separated into regular bicycle stages (n=3,416) and e-bike stages (n=693) and the most frequent stage destinations for all bicycle stages were in descending order: Other, Leisure activity, Working, and Shopping (Table 1). In contrast, car stages were more frequently for the purposes of Leisure activity, Working, Shopping and Other. E-bicycles were notably more frequently used than regular bicycles for Work and Errands and less used for Education and Transfer at transit stations.
In Table 2, the share of bicycle stages where bicycle parking was available at destinations are reported, along with the share of free car parking and car parking costs categories for car stages.
The average overall availability of bicycle parking is 76.2%. Shares vary between 48% for E-bikes in Leisure activities and 97% for regular bicycles in Education settings. Workplace destinations provide important bicycle parking opportunities (88.8%). Destinations with purposes of Errands and services and conducting Leisure activities have less frequent parking available for bicycles. Surprisingly, for seven out eight purposes, e-bikes stages are completed with lower shares of parking at the destination than regular bicycles stages. Tests of proportions are significantly different for four purposes. While these results are surprising, we surmise that: 1) many e-bikes have built-in frame locks, GPS and alert-declaring detectors that, combined with greater bike weight, can serve as deterrent for mid-day on-street theft; 2) some e-bike owners may be carless and thus more dependent on their e-bikes regardless of parking security. As e-bike may be key to a sustainable mobility system (Rérat, Marincek, and Ravalet 2024) this is suboptimal.
On average, free car parking is found at 90.9% of trip destinations. The highest share of stages where car parking was not free is for transfers at transit stations (24.3%) and for educational settings (nearly 19%, with over 12% paying more than 4 CHF). Tests of proportions reveal that save for educational settings (significantly less free car parking) and transfers at transit stations (no difference), free car parking is significantly more widely available than bicycle parking. The proposed sustainable mobility test for parking is thus failed. To support a transition to sustainable mobility and bridge the availability gap with free car parking, policies for the generalized implementation of accessible, secured and covered bicycle parking are necessary. Assessing multiple localities to identify if any actually have more bicycle parking than free car parking is an interesting area for future research. Many cities have seemingly considered that bicyclists can manage finding parking anywhere while criticizing the use of fly parking on street furniture. Demonstrating a potential imbalance is the goal of the proposed test.
The use of “provided by the owner” should be systematic in future surveys. More generally, lack of clarity on proximity, quality and abundance of parking requires improvements to data collection. This data only relates to trips that were actually conducted and therefore, for which users likely expected that parking would be available. Foregone trips due to lack of parking is another area for future research.
Acknowledgments
The Swiss National Science Foundation is acknowledged for the visiting scholar grant that enabled this research collaboration (IZSEZ0_230286). The Federal Office for Statistics and the Federal Office for Spatial Development provided the data, which may be made available upon demand (https://www.are.admin.ch/are/en/home/mobility/data/mtmc.html). All analyses and interpretations are the authors’ responsibility.