The Structure of Spatial Networks and Communities in Bicycle Sharing Systems

Martin Zaltz Austwick, Oliver O’Brien, Emanuele Strano and Matheus Viana

PLOS ONE, 2013, vol. 8, issue 9, 1-17

Abstract: Bicycle sharing systems exist in hundreds of cities around the world, with the aim of providing a form of public transport with the associated health and environmental benefits of cycling without the burden of private ownership and maintenance. Five cities have provided research data on the journeys (start and end time and location) taking place in their bicycle sharing system. In this paper, we employ visualization, descriptive statistics and spatial and network analysis tools to explore system usage in these cities, using techniques to investigate features specific to the unique geographies of each, and uncovering similarities between different systems. Journey displacement analysis demonstrates similar journey distances across the cities sampled, and the (out)strength rank curve for the top 50 stands in each city displays a similar scaling law for each. Community detection in the derived network can identify local pockets of use, and spatial network corrections provide the opportunity for insight above and beyond proximity/popularity correlations predicted by simple spatial interaction models.

Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (23)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0074685 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 74685&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0074685

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0074685

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().