Impact Evaluation of Bike-Sharing on Bicycling Accessibility
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Title : Impact Evaluation of Bike-sharing on Bicycling Accessibility
M01. Line 42. What is the intention of authors to discuss about private bike? Is private bike available in the measurement of BAcc? Meanwhile, the purpose of this study (Line 84) only about bike sharing. The reason to include private bike remains unclear in the section 1.
M02. Please remove line 95 – 102.
M03. Line 124. What is the meaning by impedance of bike travel? An example would increase the readability of this paper.
M04. Line 129. If the purpose of this study (Line 84) is about the bike sharing, should author consider private bike share which is different with shared bike only about the cost? It is obvious that the shared bike require cost and private bike will have no cost.
M05. Line 133 – 140. I think this paragraph answers my previous question. But, the explanation is not obvious in the Introduction part.
M06. Line 144. What about if the traveler is a tourist? He/she may not have a purchased bike. Hence, the assumption that a traveler has a private bike is not true (the same as Figure 1)s.
M07. Line 170. What is the supply of private bikes?
M08. What is the meaning by zonal level? Is it the measure to include the destination?
M09. Line 191 the t_od is the number of trips while Line 125 the t_od is the travel time. Authors need to use the same variable for the same definitions.
M10. Section 3. Reviewer still cannot see any details on the inclusion of private bike into the analysis. What is the impact of the result? There is no logical reason between private and bike sharing in the analysis.
M11. Section 3.1. The case study referred to the dataset of bike shared. How can authors apply the proposed method to private bike which has no GPS sensor? If the analysis is not fair in comparison. The bike shared data is based on the data while the private bike is based on the model (Line 250).
M12. This paper is related to the accessibility. While all the analysis results are mostly about availability, there is no such discussion about the accessibility measures in the visualization. Can I say that the accessibility referring to the common ground analysis of accessibility? Hence, what is the different between accessibility and availability, in particular, in the analysis result? The legend in Figure 6 should be improved to see the result of accessibility.
M13. Based on the patterns in Figure 6, availability has similar patterns as accessibility, except the patterns around subway stations. Is there any specific reason?
M14. The conclusion can be improved in accordance to the result. Since there is analysis in regard to the private bike, I guess the conclusion can be only about the bike sharing.
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Author Response
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Reviewer 2 Report
The structure and topic of the paper is clear and great. I found two points to critism:
- at the explanation for Figure1. not fully clear why the third arm (just shared bikes) is missing from the figure. Please clear this!
- although the quality of the figures are great It is worth to rethink the quantity of them. Do we need that amount of figures?
Other way I find the paper great.
Author Response
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Reviewer 3 Report
This paper addresses the issue of measuring bicycle accessibility (BAcc). Current measures of BAcc only consider privately owned bicycles. These measures likely understate the true BAcc in areas that have access to bicycle sharing, because—as the authors show—bike-sharing lowers costs for low-frequency cyclers. The authors propose a new method to measure BAcc that incorporates both privately owned bicycles and bike-sharing. They implement a real-world application of their method using Beijing as a case study and demonstrate the gains in BAcc that arise from the introduction of bike-sharing.
The paper is well written, and the topic is interesting and highly relevant. As existing measures of BAcc do account for bike-sharing, this paper makes an important methodological contribution to the literature. I have only a few minor suggestions, which I discuss in the specifc comments below.
Specific Comments:
- I do not believe the authors meant to include the paragraph beginning at line 95, describing general instructions for preparing the introduction of a manuscript.
- The authors should explain how they selected the range for E(f) and Var(f) = 0.25 (line 264).
- When discussing parameter specification in section 3.3, I believe it would be helpful to readers to also provide details on the ATd used in calculating the probability weight in the zonal BAcc, and to provide some details about the estimation of the b parameter.
- Instead of using a bulleted list to convey the main ideas from Figure 6, the authors should integrate these smoothly into the flow of the paper.
The authors point out the limitation of not including land use information in their numerical analysis, but do not address any limitations of their measurement method. I would like to see the authors provide further discussion on the potential limitations of their measure of BAcc and discuss additional avenues for future research.
Author Response
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Reviewer 4 Report
The paper refers to more and more important role of bike sharing systems in improvements of accessibility. The structure of the paper is clear and well organized, the conceptual assumptions and provided proofs are well chosen and justified. It is also important to emphasize large sample size which derives from outstanding bike sharing system in Beijing. However there are few things to be explaind:
- The comparison of private bike ad shared bike should be explained – it is intriguing that the users wonder whether to buy own bike or use the rental system. Own bicycle is used not only for commuting to work or school, but also for recreation and other daily short trips. Therefore, the assumption that the cost of purchasing a bicycle can only be compared with its rental in the obligatory journeys requires explanation (see Figure 2).
- Lines 95-102 are rather a remark, not a content of the chapter.
- Line 110 and 112 – unnecessary repetition of the interval
- Line 193 – is there any penalty for transfer? Is the system in Beijing free-flow or bicycle has to be parked in a specific place?
- Lines 336 – 337: too high values of percentage changes (37000%?)
- I am not expert in English, but in my opinion it sounds better to use cycling than a bicycling.
Author Response
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Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Title : Impact Evaluation of Bike-sharing on Bicycling Accessibility
Summary: Overall, authors have improved the manuscript in accordance to reviewer’s comments. There are some minor things that authors can improve in prior to the publication.
Minor:
Line 297- 298. What is b?
Figure 4. Although the visualization is obvious to see the similarity between the weight from data and the estimated weight, it would be scientifically good to do statistical analysis to check the similarity of both.
Author Response
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