Electric Bicycles and Public Transport Tickets: Ownership and Car Use Patterns

Abstract

Riding electric bicycles and using public transport are popular alternatives to private car use. Utilizing data from a 2022 survey of 6,285 participants in Germany, we examine who typically owns e-bikes or public transport tickets. We firstly employ regression analyses to identify correlations between individual characteristics and ebike as well as ticket ownership, respectively. We find that e-bike owners tend to be older, earn higher incomes, often reside in more rural areas, and are more likely to be male. For public transport ticket ownership, these associations are largely reversed. Through latent class analyses, we identify distinct groups of e-bike and ticket owners. In a second step, we investigate associations between e-bike or ticket ownership and car use through propensity score matching and regression analyses. We find that, compared to non-owners, owners of either alternative exhibit lower car use, with the difference being larger for public transport ticket owners.

Keywords: E-bike (Electric bicycle), Public transport, Travel mode choice, Car use, Latent class analysis, Propensity score matching

JEL Classification: L92, R22, R41