Fundamental laws of human mobility have been extensively studied, yet we are still lacking a comprehensive understanding of the mobility patterns of sharing conveyances. Since travellers would highly probably no longer possess their own conveyances in the near future, the interplay between travellers and sharing bikes is a central question for developing more sustainable transportation. Dockless bike-sharing systems that record detailed information of every trip provide us a unique opportunity for revealing the hidden patterns behind riding activities. By treating each bike as an individual entity, we reveal that distributions of mobility indicators of bikes are quite different from humans; and mobility patterns are even inconsistent across cities. All above discrepancies can be well explained by a choice model that is characterized by a universal scaling. Our model unveils that instead of choosing among the newest bikes, the distribution of rank values of selected bikes on usage condition manifests a truncated power-law and is quite stable across several cities despite various diversities. Our framework would have broad implications in sharing economy and contribute towards developing a greener, healthier, and more sustainable future city.
Following the growth of dock-based bike sharing systems as an eco-friendly solution for transportation in urban areas, Dockless systems are revolutionizing the market for the increased flexibility they offer to users. Bike redistribution is a common approach to improve service, and there exists extensive research considering static and dynamic rebalancing strategies for dock-based systems. We approach the dockless problem by defining abstract stations from trip start and end location frequency. This paper offers an optimizing Mixed Integer Program framework to model the effects of various bike…
Bike-sharing has received considerable practice and research attention over the past decade. As a manpower-driven transportation mode, it seems more sensitive to trip length, since one could take a shared bike to a destinated place where is too far to walk, or choose it for simply replacing walking when going to a nearby place. However, little research has paid attention to it, i.e., the differentiated effects of built environment on the bike-sharing demand with trip lengths. To fill the gap, this paper identifies a threshold of bike-sharing trip lengths from bike-sharing trace data, and emplo…
Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has triggered a worldwide outbreak of pandemic, and transportation services have played a key role in coronavirus transmission. Although not crowded in a confined space like a bus or a metro car, bike sharing users will be exposed to the bike surface and take the transmission risk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, how to meet user demand and avoid virus spreading has become an important issue for bike sharing. Based on the trip data of bike sharing in Nanjing, China, this study analyzes the travel demand and operation management before and after the pandemic ou…
Bike sharing is a vital component of a modern multi-modal transportation system. However, its implementation can lead to bike supply-demand imbalance due to fluctuating spatial and temporal demands. This study proposes a comprehensive framework to develop optimal dynamic bike rebalancing strategies in a large bike sharing network. It consists of three components, including a station-level pick-up/drop-off prediction model, station clustering model, and capacitated location-routing optimization model. For the first component, we propose a powerful deep learning model called graph convolution ne…
Big, transport-related datasets are nowadays publicly available, which makes data-driven mobility analysis possible. Trips with their origins, destinations and travel times are collected in publicly available big databases, which allows for a deeper and richer understanding of mobility patterns. This paper proposes a low dimensional approach to combine these data sources with weather data in order to forecast the daily demand for Bike Sharing Systems (BSS). The core of this approach lies in the proposed clustering technique, which reduces the dimension of the problem and, differently from othe…
Bike-sharing systems have been regarded as a critical component of solutions towards the transition to greener and more sustainable transportation, with the benefits of reducing carbon emissions, improving public health, and mitigating congestion by replacing short-distance motorized trips. Due to better accessibility and usage flexibility, newly emergent dockless sharing bikes have become quite popular and are reviving the fashion of cycling in cities. Urban congestion is simultaneously influenced by heterogeneous saptio-temporal travel demands, topology and spatial characteristics of road ne…
The Citi Bike deployment changes the landscape of urban mobility in New York City and provides an example of a scalable solution that many other large cities are already adopting around the world. Urban stakeholders who are considering a similar deployment would largely benefit from a quantitative assessment of the impact of bike sharing on urban transportation, as well as associated economic, social and environmental implications. While the Citi Bike usage data is publicly available, the main challenge of such an assessment is to provide an adequate baseline scenario of what would have happen…
Bike-sharing transportation systems have been well studied from a top-down viewpoint, either for an optimal conception of the system, or for a better statistical understanding of their working mechanisms in the aim of the optimization of the management strategy. Yet bottom-up approaches that could include behavior of users have not been well studied so far. We propose an agent-based model for the short time evolution of a bike-sharing system, with a focus on two strategical parameters that are the role of the quantity of information users have on the all system and the propensity of user to wa…
The paper develops models for modeling the availability of bikes in the San Francisco Bay Area Bike Share System applying machine learning at two levels: network and station. Investigating BSSs at the station-level is the full problem that would provide policymakers, planners, and operators with the needed level of details to make important choices and conclusions. We used Random Forest and Least-Squares Boosting as univariate regression algorithms to model the number of available bikes at the station-level. For the multivariate regression, we applied Partial Least-Squares Regression (PLSR) to…
Due to the wide-ranging travel restrictions and lockdowns applied to limit the diffusion of the SARS-CoV2 virus, the coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had an immediate and significant effect on human mobility at the global, national, and local levels. At the local level, bike-sharing played a significant role in urban transport during the pandemic since riders could travel outdoors with reduced infection risk. However, based on different data resources, this non-motorized mode of transportation was still negatively affected by the pandemic (i.e., relative reduction in ridersh…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Virginia Tech Transportation Institute（弗吉尼亚理工大学交通研究所）
The paper develops a method that quantifies the effect of weather conditions on the prediction of bike station counts in the San Francisco Bay Area Bike Share System. The Random Forest technique was used to rank the predictors that were then used to develop a regression model using a guided forward step-wise regression approach. The Bayesian Information Criterion was used in the development and comparison of the various prediction models. We demonstrated that the proposed approach is promising to quantify the effect of various features on a large BSS and on each station in cases of large netwo…
Virginia Tech（弗吉尼亚理工大学）；Virginia Tech Transportation Institute（弗吉尼亚理工交通研究所）；Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering（土木与环境工程系）；Dept. of Statistics（统计系）；Dept. of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程系）
This paper models the availability of bikes at San Francisco Bay Area Bike Share stations using machine learning algorithms. Random Forest (RF) and Least-Squares Boosting (LSBoost) were used as univariate regression algorithms, and Partial Least-Squares Regression (PLSR) was applied as a multivariate regression algorithm. The univariate models were used to model the number of available bikes at each station. PLSR was applied to reduce the number of required prediction models and reflect the spatial correlation between stations in the network. Results clearly show that univariate models have lo…
Bike sharing systems (BSS) have been growing fast all over the world, along with the number of articles analyzing such systems. However the lack of temporally large trip databases has limited the analysis of BSS users behavior in the long term. This article studies the V'elo'v - a BSS located in Lyon, France - subscribers commitment in the long term and the evolution of their usage over time. Using a 5-year dataset covering 121,000 long-term distinct users, we show the heterogeneous individual trajectories masked by the overall system stability. Users follow two main trajectories: about 60% re…
Micro-mobility ride-sharing is an emerging technology that provides access to the transit system with minimum environmental impacts. Significant research is required to ensure that micro-mobility ride-sharing provides a better fulfilment of user needs. In this study, we propose a novel business model for the micro-mobility ride-sharing system where light vehicles such as electric scooters and electric bikes are crowdsourced. This new model consists of three entities, the suppliers, the customers, and a management party, which is responsible for receiving, renting, booking, and demand matching …
Bikesharing schemes are transportation systems that not only provide an efficient mode of transportation in congested urban areas, but also improve last-mile connectivity with public transportation and local accessibility. Bikesharing schemes around the globe generate detailed trip data sets with spatial and temporal dimensions, which, with proper mining and analysis, reveal valuable information on urban mobility patterns. In this paper, we study the London bicycle sharing dataset to explore community structures. Using a novel clustering technique, we derive distinctive behavioural patterns an…
During the epidemics of COVID-19, the whole world is experiencing a serious crisis on public health and economy. Understanding human mobility during the pandemic helps one to design intervention strategies and resilience measures. The widely used Bike Sharing System (BSS) can characterize the activities of urban dwellers over time & space in big cities but is rarely reported in epidemiological research. In this paper, we present a human mobility analyzing framework} based on BSS data, which examines the spatiotemporal characteristics of share bike users, detects the key time nodes of different…
Drivers and barriers to integrating shared micromobility with public transport: a latent class clustering analysis of adoption attitudes in the Netherlands
