Research Suggests Boston’s New Protected Lanes Boosted Bikeshare Traffic 80 Percent
A new statistical analysis of ridership data from the Bluebikes system suggests that the new Commonwealth Avenue protected bike lanes, which were finished in 2019, increased bike traffic by at least 80 percent relative to the paint-only bike lane that existed before the construction project began.
In a new paper published this month in the Case Studies on Transport Policy journal, Elizabeth Karpinski, a senior data scientist for the MITRE Corporation, describes three statistical models she used to see whether a surge in Bluebikes ridership in the Allston, North Brookline, and Fenway neighborhoods could be attributed to the new bike lane or to other, more general factors.
“I was studying changes in travel patterns in the bikeshare system, and I noticed that Commonwealth Avenue had very predictable ridership until, right around 2018, I saw a spike in activity among the stations around that route. The traffic just exploded. It was such a strong effect that I got curious, and that’s when I saw they had put in a separated bike lane,” said Karpinski in a phone conversation with Streetsblog on Wednesday.