Evaluating transfer efficiency between public transportation and bike sharing for Mobility as a Service (MaaS)

Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS) depends on seamless connections between public transport and bike-sharing systems. These intermodal connections are essential for enhancing accessibility and enabling flexible, multimodal travel. This study proposes a new framework to evaluate the connections, with particular attention to how well public transport and bike-sharing are integrated. The analysis adopts a two-stage evaluation structure that reflects the sequential nature of intermodal travel, starting with public transport, generating transfer demand, and ending with bike-sharing use. A key feature of the model is the use of an optimized intermediate variable representing transfer demand, which allows the evaluation to account for inter-stage efficiency dynamics. The model is applied to 30 major transfer stations in Seoul. Efficiency is measured on a scale from 0 to 1, with 1 indicating the best-performing stations. Results show an average score of 0.59, with higher performance observed in stations located in dense, mixed-use areas. In contrast, stations in car-oriented or low-demand neighbourhoods tend to underperform. Compared to a conventional evaluation method, 13 stations exhibited up to 6.7% lower efficiency, suggesting that improvements in public transport are critical to enhancing overall intermodal integration. These findings demonstrate the value of a behaviourally grounded evaluation approach that captures the real-world dynamics of multimodal travel, offering insights for improving MaaS planning and intermodal coordination.HighlightsPublic transport–bike transfer efficiency is evaluated for MaaSA two-stage network DEA captures sequential intermodal efficiency dynamicsA Seoul case study reveals an average transfer efficiency score of 0.63Mixed-use dense areas improve multimodal integration efficiencyTobit regression identifies land use and population density as key drivers