Urban greenness mitigates the negative effect of extreme heat on docked bike-sharing demand: Evidence from Chicago

Extreme heat is becoming an increasingly severe environmental constraint on low-carbon urban travel. As a travel mode that is directly exposed to outdoor conditions, bike-sharing is especially sensitive to changes in the thermal environment. Although previous studies have examined how thermal conditions affect bike-sharing usage, there is still limited direct empirical evidence on whether greenness around bike-sharing stations can reduce the negative impact of heat on cycling demand. Using Chicago’s docked bike-sharing system as a case, this study constructs a station-hour panel dataset based on approximately 2.3 million valid trip records from May to September 2024. A fixed-effects Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood model is used to examine the effect of extreme heat on bike-sharing trips and to test whether greenness around stations moderates this effect. The results show that extreme heat hours significantly reduce bike-sharing trips, while higher levels of greenness around stations clearly weaken this negative effect. The predicted decline in trips caused by heat decreases from about 3.8% at low-greenness stations to about 0.2% at high-greenness stations. Robustness checks show that this relationship remains broadly consistent under different heat thresholds and alternative thermal indicators. These findings indicate that the heat sensitivity of bike-sharing usage is spatially uneven and shaped by local environmental conditions. By linking thermal stress, urban greenness, and bike-sharing behavior, this study provides empirical evidence for integrating green infrastructure into heat-resilient mobility planning.