The interaction of weather factors on multimodal public transportation: An empirical research on the combination of bike-sharing and metro

Document Type

Journal Article

Publication Date

2026

Subject Area

place - north america, place - urban, mode - bike, mode - subway/metro, ridership - behaviour, planning - methods

Keywords

bike-sharing and metro (BSM), impact of weather factors

Abstract

Weather factors significantly influence urban public transportation travel. This research took the combined travel mode of bike-sharing and metro (BSM) in Washington D.C. as an example to analyze the feature importance of weather factors using a Random Forest (RF) model, and identified the weather factors that contribute the most to the combined travel mode of BSM. The interpretable machine learning (IML) method was adopted to evaluate the strength of the interaction between weather factors, identify the combination of key weather factors and their second-order interaction effects, and evaluate their impact on the combined travel mode of BSM. The research results indicate that: (1) The impact of weather factors on the combined travel mode of BSM follows a non-linear relationship. Temperature, visibility, and UV index demonstrate positive correlations with BSM travel volume, while wind speed, daily rainfall, and air quality exhibit negative correlations. (2) Temperature has a strong impact on the combined travel mode of BSM, with its feature importance reaching 38 %, and the strength of its global interaction effect reaching to 0.22. (3) The second-order interaction effects of temperature-ultraviolet intensity, temperature-daily rainfall, and temperature-humidity have the most significant impact on the combined travel mode of BSM. Lastly, this research formulates a series of policy and management recommendations aimed at promoting BSM combined travel within a multidimensional framework encompassing land use, operational technology, cross-sector collaboration, and infrastructure, providing important references for the rational guidance of public transportation travel behavior and the optimization of transportation planning policies.

Rights

Permission to publish the abstract has been given by Elsevier, copyright remains with them.

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