The combination of cycling and public transport (PT) use has been found to be very successful in the Netherlands. On average, 47% of daily train users cycle to a railway station and this number is expected to grow to until at least 2030. As a result, railway stations suffer from bicycle parking capacity shortages. Large investments are needed to meet the growing demand for bicycle parking capacity, while the expansions take up the limited space around railway stations. To address the ever-growing demand for bicycle parking capacity and to continue the success of the combined use of bicycle and PT, alternative solutions beyond building new bicycle parking facilities are needed.
Bicycle sharing is a promising strategy to tackle bicycle parking capacity shortages at railway stations as it could significantly reduce the number of parked bicycles. A fundamental prerequisite is that a bicycle sharing system (BSS) makes use of the already parked bicycles, which is not the case with the available PT-bicycle system in the Netherlands. Existing literature shows that bicycle sharing between current cyclists has the potential, in theory, to reduce the number of parked bicycles by 22-25% at the central railway stations of the four largest cities in the Netherlands. When bicycles are also shared with travellers currently using other modes 37-50% capacity savings could be achieved. Currently there is a lack of knowledge about bicycle sharing from a user’s perspective to make a more realistic estimation of the expected potential. The important factors in bicycle sharing among potential users need to be clarified in order to estimate the potential demand and to progress towards the design of the organisation of an efficient system. Therefore the objective of this study is to investigate the preferences of current bicycle-train users and the demand for bicycle sharing in order to design an efficient bicycle sharing system (BSS).