A finite mixture modeling approach to examine New York City bicycle sharing system (CitiBike) users’ destination preferences

Given the recent growth of bicycle-sharing systems (BSS) around the world, it is of interest to BSS operators/analysts to identify contributing factors that influence individuals’ decision processes in adoption and usage of bicycle-sharing systems. The current study contributes to research on BSS by examining user behavior at a trip level. Specifically, we study the decision process involved in identifying destination locations after picking up the bicycle at a BSS station. In the traditional destination/location choice approaches, the model frameworks implicitly assume that the influence of exogenous factors on the destination preferences is constant across the entire population. We propose a finite mixture multinomial logit (FMMNL) model that accommodates such heterogeneity by probabilistically assigning trips to different segments and estimate segment-specific destination choice models for each segment. Unlike the traditional destination choice based multinomial logit (MNL) model or mixed multinomial logit (MMNL), in an FMMNL model, we can consider the effect of fixed attributes across destinations such as users’ or origins’ attributes in the decision process. Using data from New York City bicycle-sharing system (CitiBike) for 2014, we develop separate models for members and non-members. We validate our models using hold-out samples and compare our proposed FMMNL model results with the traditional MNL and MMNL model results. The proposed FMMNL model provides better results in terms of goodness of fit measures, explanatory power and prediction performance.