Title: Bikeshare Paradigms, User Perceptions, and the Urban Experience
Description: Bicycle sharing schemes have gone global and the number of shared bicycles in use has ostensibly more than doubled over the past two years. Two general paradigms of bikeshare are currently competing for resources as well as hearts and minds of potential customers. Dockless bikeshare (best represented by Mobike Shanghai) and docked bikeshare (best represented by Citi Bike New York) are opposites in many regards, but their goals tend to dovetail. This study addresses the similarities and differences of these bikeshare paradigms, investigating their impacts on users' experiences of their respective urban milieus and the antecedents and correlates of user perceptions, based on survey questionnaires deployed in Shanghai and New York. This study finds that dockless bikeshare shows advantages over docked bikeshare, manifested in a greater diversity of ridership among participants, more substantive perceived effects on users' relationships with their urban environment, and an overarching importance of convenience to user perceptions.

The projected expansion of bikeshare, especially dockless bikeshare underscored the timeliness of this study. By offering future directions for researchers and policymakers, this study will thus aid interested parties in decision-making process with regard to bikeshare support and implementation.