The pulse of the cycling city: visualising Madrid bike share system GPS routes and cycling flow (original) (raw)

Examining spatio-temporal mobility patterns of bike-sharing systems: the case of BiciMAD (Madrid)

Journal of Maps

Over the past decades, Bike-Sharing Systems have been implemented in hundreds of cities all around the world. During this time, numerous academic studies have been published with analyses from different perspectives. The aim of this study is to build upon this research by bringing together a spatial and a temporal analysis of the cycling flow of BiciMAD, the Madrid Bike-Sharing System. By combining over 21 million GPS records and various maps the study visually explores cycling mobility patterns across the city on three different temporal scales: over the course of the day, during working days or weekends and over the course of a whole year to provide a better understanding of the season-dependent demand. The study also reveals the most important flows between origin-destination pairs and uncovers the radically different spatio-temporal travel patterns of frequent users and occasional users.

Madrid cycle track: visualizing the cyclable city

Journal of Maps, 2015

Maps are currently experiencing a paradigm shift from static representations to dynamic platforms that capture, visualize and analyse new data, bringing different possibilities for exploration and research. The first objective of this paper is to present a map that illustrates, for the first time, the real flow of casual cyclists and bike messengers in the city of Madrid. The second objective is to describe the development and results of the Madrid Cycle Track initiative, an online platform launched with the aim of collecting cycling routes and other information from volunteers. In the framework of this initiative, different online maps are presented and their functionalities described. Finally, a supplemental video visualizes the cyclist flow over the course of a day

Abstracting mobility flows from bike-sharing systems

Public Transport, 2021

Bicycling has grown significantly in the past ten years. In some regions, the implementation of large-scale bike-sharing systems and improved cycling infrastructure are two of the factors enabling this growth. An increase in non-motorized modes of transportation makes our cities more human, decreases pollution, traffic, and improves quality of life. In many cities around the world, urban planners and policymakers are looking at cycling as a sustainable way of improving urban mobility. Although bike-sharing systems generate abundant data about their users' travel habits, most cities still rely on traditional tools and methods for planning and policy-making. Recent technological advances enable the collection and analysis of large amounts of data about urban mobility, which can serve as a solid basis for evidence-based policy-making. In this paper, we introduce a novel analytical method that can be used to process millions of bike-sharing trips and analyze bikesharing mobility, abstracting relevant mobility flows across specific urban areas. Backed by a visualization platform, this method provides a comprehensive set of analytical tools to support public authorities in making data-driven policy and planning decisions. This paper illustrates the use of the method with a case study of the Greater Boston bike-sharing system and, as a result, presents new findings about that particular system. Finally, an assessment with expert users showed that this method and tool were considered very useful, relatively easy to use and that they intend to adopt the tool in the near future.

Bike-sharing mobility patterns: a data-driven analysis for the city of Lisbon

EAI Endorsed Transactions on Smart Cities, 2021

New technologies applied to transportation services in the city, enable the shift to sustainable transportation modes making bike-sharing systems (BSS) more popular in the urban mobility scenario. This study focuses on understanding the spatiotemporal station and trip activity patterns in the Lisbon BSS, based in 2018 data taken as the baseline, and understand trip rate changes in such system, that happened in the following years of 2019 and 2020. Furthermore, our paper aims to understand the COVID-19 pandemic impact in BSS mobility patterns. In this paper, we analyzed large datasets adopting a CRISP-DM data mining method. By studying and identifying spatiotemporal distribution of trips through stations, combined with weather factors, we looked at BSS improvements more suitable to accommodate users’ demand. Our major contribution was a new insight on how people move in the city using bikes, via a data science approach using BSS network usage data. Major findings show that most bike ...

Unified, Low-Cost Analysis Framework For The Cycling Situation In Cities

2012

We propose a low-cost uniform analysis framework allowing comparison of the strengths and weaknesses of the bicycling experience within and between cities. A primary component is an expedient, one-page mobility survey from which mode share is calculated. The bicycle mode share of many cities remains unknown, creating a serious barrier for both scientists and policy makers aiming to understand and increase rates of bicycling. Because of its low cost and expedience, this framework could be replicated widely, uniformly filling the data gap. The framework has been applied to 13 Central European cities with success. Data is collected on multiple modes with specific questions regarding both behavior and quality of travel experience. Individual preferences are also collected, examining the conditions under which respondents would change behavior to adopt more sustainable modes (bicycling or public transportation). A broad analysis opportunity results, intended to inform policy choices.

Comparing cities’ cycling patterns using online shared bicycle maps

2015

Bicycle sharing systems are increasingly being deployed in urban areas around the world, alongside online maps that disclose the state (i.e., location, number of bicycles/number of free parking slots) of stations in each city. Recent work has demonstrated how regularly monitoring these online maps allows for a granular analysis of a city’s cycling trends; further, the literature indicates that different cities have unique spatio-temporal patterns, reducing the generalisability of any insights or models derived from a single system. In this work, we analyse 4.5 months of online bike-sharing map data from ten cities which, combined, have 996 stations. While an aggregate comparison supports the view of cities having unique usage patterns, results of applying unsupervised learning to the temporal data shows that, instead, only the larger systems display heterogeneous behaviour, indicating that many of these systems share intrinsic similarities. We further show how these similarities are reflected in the predictability of stations’ occupancy data via a cross-city comparison of the error that a variety of approaches achieve when forecasting the number of bicycles that a station will have in the near future. We close by discussing the impact of uncovering these similarities on how future bicycle sharing systems can be designed, built, and managed.

Everyday cycling in urban environments: Understanding behaviours and constraints in space-time

2013

Cycling in British cities is increasing but at a slow rate nationally. The ultimate realizations of cycling benefits in urban areas, such as cities in North East England, are hampered by lack of appropriate data to aid in our understanding of cycling behaviors to inform policy strategies and improve cycling uptake as well as data processing methodologies. Several efforts are being made to enhance data availability to understand cycling behaviors to inform policy strategies for which this research aims to contribute by providing evidence on the use of the area's cycling infrastructure by utility cyclists. A proposed corridor space analytical approach was used to analyze the newly collected 7-day GPS data from 79 utility cyclists to estimate the extent to which respondents used the area's cycling infrastructure. The data was used together with the area cycling infrastructure data from Newcastle City Council. Findings from the corridor space analysis suggest that 57.4 % of cyclists from sample prefer cycling on the cycle network, while 33.8 % cycle outside the cycle network with 8.8 % near the cycle network. Also, for all cycle trips, men tend to dominate in cycling on and near the cycle network. Both the males and females tend to use the cycle network more than off the network for utility trips. With 42.6 % of cyclists still cycling outside the designated cycle network, it is imperative that policy initiatives are aimed towards investing in cycling research and infrastructure to further deepen our understanding to encourage cycling around the study area. It was also suggested that the captured detailed actual route choice preferences could serve as input to the development of agent-based models towards understanding cycling behaviors around the study area.

Spatial analysis of dynamic movements of Velo'v, Lyon's shared bicycle program

2009

Public transportation systems like Lyon's bicycle community sharing pro- gram can be considered as a complex system composed of interconnected stations that exchange bicycles. Such system generates digital footprints that reveals the activity in the city over time and space and make possible their analyze. In this paper, the analysis deals with the spatial understanding and visualization of bicycle trips.

Route Choice Analysis of Urban Cycling Behaviors Using OpenStreetMap: Evidence from a British Urban Environment

Lecture Notes in Geoinformation and Cartography, 2015

The neglect of non-motorized transportation options in transport planning and demand modelling is gradually being addressed in the United Kingdom. In route choice research there has been, in recent years, a trend away from modelling hypothetical situations towards field testing. This is partly due to the effective use of emerging GPS technologies for gathering travel behavior data in "wild" urban spaces, making it possible to observe realistic situations. Such data on detailed travel behaviors offer possibilities for further research, especially in the non-motorized transportation arena. Globally, there has been progress in the development of cyclists' route choice models using revealed preference GPS data from various geographical and local contexts. However, we have little evidence on detailed cyclists' route choices in the UK in a national and local context. This is particularly the case with low cycling participation cities in North England, where there have been various attempts to increase cycling uptake in recent years. This chapter fills this knowledge gap by undertaking a route choice analysis using the cycling-friendly version of OpenStreetMap (OSM) as the transportation network for analysis, alongside GPS tracks (7 days) and travel diary data for 79 Utility Cyclists around Newcastle upon Tyne in North East England. We examined specific variables as proposed in the relevant cycling literature and used these to develop a model testing the null hypothesis that network restrictions (i.e. one way, turn restrictions and access) do not have any significant influence on the movement of commuter cyclists. The findings suggest that OSM can provide a robust transportation network for cycling research, in particular when combined with GPS track data. The observed routes were significantly longer than their shortest path alternatives, the only exception being the straight-line distance between the observed bike routes and the unrestricted network routes, where the difference was not statistically significant.