The bicycle-train travellers in the Netherlands: personal profiles and travel choices

Abstract

The Netherlands seems to exhibit the unique conditions that allow cycling on the country level instead of only the city level. Moreover, the national transit system seemingly provides one crucial condition: citizens use the train and cycling systems in an integrated manner, with combined bicycle-train transport recently demonstrating strong growth. Relatively little is known about bicycle-train users, i.e. the people who combine the bicycle and the train in a single trip. In this paper, we investigate their profiles and travel choices, in terms of the modes they choose for access and egress travel, their choice of stations, and their choice of type of bicycles. Studying this specific group can add to our understanding of the role of the train system in the success of cycling in the Netherlands, in turn helping improve policy transfer to metropolitan areas in other countries. In 2017, in cooperation with the Dutch National Railways, researchers surveyed a sample of train travellers, ultimately resulting in more than 3000 completed questionnaires. Descriptive analyses revealed that, compared to train travellers who do not or rarely cycle to/from train stations, bicycle-train users are on average more likely to be young people who are engaged in fulltime employment or entrepreneurs, commute to work and hold university degrees. As for their cycling behaviour, bicycle-train travellers use bicycles much more often on the homeend of train trips than on the activity-end. Furthermore, bicycle-train travellers infrequently use suburban stations on the home-end, preferring large stations in the centres of major cities instead. For those who use bicycles, shared bicycles claim a considerable share on the activity-end of a train trip.

Scaling up cycling or replacing driving? Triggers and trajectories of bike–train uptake in the Randstad area

“…The connecting lines between the left and right side provide an indication of the relative size of various access-egress mode combinations: as can be seen, the combination of cycling (access) and walking (egress) is the most common. In agreement with previous research (Jonkeren et al 2019), bike use is markedly higher on the access than on the egress side (86% vs. 35%). On the access side, the majority of respondents simply use their own regular bicycle (73%), with a much smaller percentage using, e-bikes (7%), folding bikes (5%), bikesharing (< 1%) or OV-fiets (< 1%).…”

“…Our sample is balanced in terms of gender, but is significantly younger, more educated and has a higher household income than the Dutch average. Such results are largely in line with those of previous studies (Jonkeren et al 2019;Shelat, Huisman, and van Oort 2018), which also found that bike-train travellers tend to be highly educated, with a large proportion of full-time professionals with high incomes, as well as university and school students. In the case of our survey, 61% of respondents worked for an external employer, while 22% were studying or attending school (the rest were either self-employed or not engaged in paid employment).…”

“…Throughout the paper, all references to "commuting" should be interpreted accordingly. We excluded irregular or variable bike-train trips because it would have been difficult to fit them within the survey structure; moreover, previous research has shown that regular commuting journeys constitute the large majority of bike-train trips in the Netherlands (Jonkeren et al 2019).…”

“…For this same reason, the Netherlands has attracted the lion's share of existing research on bike-train travel. In recent years, a growing number of studies focusing on the Netherlands have provided an incipient understanding of bike-train trip patterns and user characteristics within the Dutch context (Shelat et al 2018;Jonkeren et al 2019). Albeit not to the same extent as in the Netherlands, the bicycle-train combination is also popular in other mature cycling countries such as Denmark: as documented in a study by Olafsson et al (2016) in a representative sample of the Danish population, about 12% of the Danish population use cycling as a means of reaching public transport.…”

Insights into factors affecting the combined bicycle-transit mode

“…Bicycletransit combines the advantages of speed and accessibility of (particularly higher level) transit with the flexibility and reliability of the bicycle. Recent publications have highlighted the potential of the marginalised and little researched bicycletransit combination (Jonkeren et al 2019;Kager et al 2016;KiM 2016b;Scheltema 2012). This paper aims to provide new knowledge on the bicycle-transit combination.…”