Temperature, bike sharing, and health costs: Evidence from New York City

Bike sharing plays a pivotal role in promoting sustainable urban development, with existing literature highlighting various factors that shape the demand for shared bikes. By analyzing high-frequency data from over 35 million bike-share trips in New York City between 2018 and 2019, we quantify the nonlinear effect of temperature on three key bike-share outcomes: trip duration, distance, and average speed. Furthermore, we investigate how different types of bike-share users respond to temperature shocks. Our findings show that users generally avoid extreme temperatures, whether cold or hot. Notably, non-seniors, female users, short-term customers, weekend riders, and users with longer commutes demonstrate greater sensitivity to such temperature extremes. Linking the health effects of bike-share trips, our back-of-the-envelope analysis suggests a substantial reduction in health costs driven by increased bike-share ridership, aligning with projected warming temperatures by 2050. However, these benefits are tempered by a marked decline in bike-share demand during the summer, which offsets some of the gains from increased ridership due to warming trends.