Studying Solutions of the p-Median Problem for the Location of Public Bike Stations

The use of bicycles as a means of transport is becoming more and more popular today, especially in urban areas, to avoid the disadvantages of individual car traffic. In fact, city managers react to this trend and actively promote the use of bicycles by providing a network of bicycles for public use and stations where they can be stored. Establishing such a network involves the task of finding best locations for stations, which is, however, not a trivial task. In this work, we examine models to determine the best location of bike stations so that citizens will travel the shortest distance possible to one of them. Based on real data from the city of Malaga, we formulate our problem as a p-median problem and solve it with a variable neighborhood search algorithm that was automatically configured with irace. We compare the locations proposed by the algorithm with the real ones used currently by the city council. We also study where new locations should be placed if the network grows.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech. This research was partially funded by the University of Málaga, Andalucı́a Tech, the Spanish MINECO and FEDER projects: TIN2014- 57341-R, TIN2016-81766-REDT, and TIN2017-88213-R. C. Cintrano is supported by a FPI grant (BES-2015-074805) from Spanish MINECO

Perceptions of Bicycle-Friendly Policy Impacts on Accessibility to Transit Services: The First and Last Mile Bridge, MTI Report 12-10

The coordination of bicycle and transit modes has received close attention from public transit planners and researchers in recent years, as transit agencies around the world have installed bicycle racks on transit vehicles, implemented bicycles-on-trains policies, and made other efforts to facilitate bicycle-transit integration. Many planners presume that the catchment area for transit is enlarged by these efforts, but geographic changes in the size of catchment areas have not been effectively documented. This research project was designed to assess the distances travelled on bicycle by cycle-transit users (CTUs), both those who use bicycles as a means of access to transit stops and stations and those who bicycle to and travel on transit with their bicycles. A mixed-methods approach was employed, using a literature review, a survey of cyclist-transit users in Philadelphia and San Francisco, and telephone interviews with a subset of survey respondents. Responses provided by CTUs in the two cities allow us to define their characteristics and behaviors in detail. What is more, they highlight two intriguing conclusions: that transit catchment areas can be much larger for cycle-transit users than for traditional transit users who access transit buses and rail on foot, and that the very concept of a cycle-transit catchment area is quite complex because of the variety of travel opportunities that cycle-transit coordination policies present transit riders. CTUs take advantage of larger catchment areas to reduce their travel costs, and they use those catchment areas in curious, less predictable and more varied ways

Understanding the diffusion of public bikesharing systems: evidence from Europe and North America

Since the mid-2000s, public bikesharing (also known as “bike hire”) has developed and spread into a new form of mobility in cities across the globe. This paper presents an analysis of the recent increase in the number of public bikesharing systems. Bikesharing is the shared use of a bicycle fleet, which is accessible to the public and serves as a form of public transportation. The initial system designs were pioneered in Europe and, after a series of technological innovations, appear to have matured into a system experiencing widespread adoption. There are also signs that the policy of public bikesharing systems is transferable and is being adopted in other contexts outside Europe. In public policy, the technologies that are transferred can be policies, technologies, ideals or systems. This paper seeks to describe the nature of these systems, how they have spread in time and space, how they have matured in different contexts, and why they have been adopted. Researchers provide an analysis from Europe and North America. The analysis draws on published data sources, a survey of 19 systems, and interviews with 12 decision-makers in Europe and 14 decision-makers in North America. The data are examined through the lens of diffusion theory, which allows for comparison of the adoption process in different contexts. A mixture of quantitative and qualitative analyses is used to explore the reasons for adoption decisions in different cities. The paper concludes that Europe is still in a major adoption process with new systems emerging and growth in some existing systems, although some geographic areas have adopted alternative solutions. Private sector operators have also been important entrepreneurs in a European context, which has accelerated the uptake of these systems. In North America, the adoption process is at an earlier stage and is gaining momentum, but signs also suggest the growing importance of entrepreneurs in North America with respect to technology and business models. There is evidence to suggest that the policy adoption processes have been inspired by successful systems in Paris, Lyon, Montreal, and Washington, DC, for instance, and that diffusion theory could be useful in understanding public bikesharing policy adoption in a global context

MOBILITY AND ACTIVITY SPACE: UNDERSTANDING HUMAN DYNAMICS FROM MOBILE PHONE LOCATION DATA

Studying human mobility patterns and people’s use of space has been a major focus in geographic research for ages. Recent advancements of location-aware technologies have produced large collections of individual tracking datasets. Mobile phone location data, as one of the many emerging data sources, provide new opportunities to understand how people move around at a relatively low cost and unprecedented scale. However, the increasing data volume, issue of data sparsity, and lack of supplementary information introduce additional challenges when such data are used for human behavioral research. Effective analytical methods are needed to meet the challenges to gain an improved understanding of individual mobility and collective behavioral patterns. This dissertation proposes several approaches for analyzing two types of mobile phone location data (Call Detail Records and Actively Tracked Mobile Phone Location Data) to uncover important characteristics of human mobility patterns and activity spaces. First, it introduces a home-based approach to understanding the spatial extent of individual activity space and the geographic patterns of aggregate activity space characteristics. Second, this study proposes an analytical framework which is capable of examining multiple determinants of individual activity space simultaneously. Third, the study introduces an anchor-point based trajectory segmentation method to uncover potential demand of bicycle trips in a city. The major contributions of this dissertation include: (1) introducing an activity space measure that can be used to evaluate how individuals use urban space around where they live; (2) proposing an analytical framework with three individual mobility indicators that can be used to summarize and compare human activity spaces systematically across different population groups or geographic regions; (3) developing analytical methods for uncovering the spatiotemporal dynamics of travel demand that can be potentially served by bicycles in a city, and providing suggestions for the locations and daily operation of bike sharing stations

Bike sharing as part of urban mobility in Helsinki : a user perspective

The number of bike-sharing systems has increased rapidly during the last decade. These systems expand urban mobility options and provide a solution to the so-called “last-mile” problem. While new bike-sharing systems are opened and current ones expanded in Finland and elsewhere in large numbers, it is important to understand how these systems are used and by whom. Despite the wealth of bike-sharing literature, usage patterns by different user groups are still not yet well studied. This knowledge is needed to ensure that the benefits of bike-sharing systems distribute as evenly as possible to the citizens. In this study, I have employed a person-based approach to study mobility patterns of bike-sharing users in Helsinki. The system in Helsinki was opened in 2016 and the urban bikes quickly became popular among citizens. I have aimed to understand how equally the bike-sharing system in Helsinki is serving the citizens and how different user groups have differed from each other in their use. I have also studied how the system is linking to public transport in Helsinki and compared the bike-sharing system usage and users in Helsinki to other systems internationally. These specific questions stem from the systematic literature review on bike-sharing (n=799), which I carried out before the empirical study. In this study, I have used a dataset provided by Helsinki Region Transport, which contained all the bike-sharing trips (~1.5 million) from 2017. Besides the trip information, the dataset contained the basic demographic information of the user. The results of literature review show bike-sharing systems have been an active and extensive study topic even though the study areas are mostly concentrated to certain cities. Based on the empirical data-analysis, majority of bike-sharing users are young adults between 25-35 years old whereas the share of over 50 year olds is only 12 %. Both men and women use urban bikes actively but men are overrepresented both in the number of users and trips. The use of bikes is not equal but a small minority of users have generated the majority of trips. The users who live inside the bike station coverage area make around 80 % of the trips implying that the proximity of a station has a considerable impact on the use. Trip profiles of those living inside the system coverage area differ considerably from those who live outside the area. For example, the users living inside the area seem to combine urban bikes less with public transport and they use urban bikes relatively more on weekends compared to the other group. The subscription type and use activity are also important factors shaping usage patterns. Then again, age and gender are more important in determining whether someone chooses to become a user than in shaping usage patterns. The use of bike-sharing system in Helsinki has been high even when compared internationally. The results of this study show that the high usage rates still do not necessarily mean that the system would be equally used by citizens. Based on the systematic review, equity is a critical topic to address in relation to bike-sharing users. The user profiles in Helsinki seem to follow similar patterns of bike sharing as found in other cities with an overrepresentation of certain population groups. The use of young adults might promise well for the change of urban mobility. However, it is important to keep promoting cycling to a wider range of the population. The bike-sharing system in Helsinki will expand in 2019 to new areas. Based on the results of this study the expansion seems reasonable as a large part of the users live close to a bike-sharing station. The expansion will then bring the full benefits of bike sharing accessible to a larger group of people in Helsinki. The system seems both to replace and extend the public transport system, which is common to bike-sharing systems in many cities. From the data perspective, the origin-destination type of trip data, which was used in this study, provided a great deal of useful information about users and usage profiles. Even when accounting for limitations in this data type, it is still an excellent addition complementing existing cycling data sources

Bike Share Systems and Equitable Disaster Management: Utilization in Low-income Neighborhoods Amid Subway Flood Damage

We focus on the equity problem of the IT-enabled public bike share systems and posit that shared bicycles become a heavily reliant mode of transportation in low-income neighborhoods during abrupt suspensions of subway systems caused by disasters. Although bike share is known to provide many social benefits, it has been often criticized for having low usage and lazy expansion among low-income neighborhoods. We leverage a natural experiment setting to estimate the effect of flood damage to subway lines on the demand for public bike share service. Through a quasi-experiment analysis, we find that the effect of flood significantly increases bike share usage in low-income neighborhoods while not profoundly affecting usage in high-income neighborhoods. From the results, we shed light on the previously undiscovered role of bike share in the disaster management context and its role in mitigating the transportation disturbance of low-income commuters