“Station location optimizing of bike-share programs”

In the past few years there has been a substantial increase in urban planners implementing bike share programs to decrease vehicles on roadways.  The data being used  frequently does not aid people living in city as much as it does tourists.  This group looked at a few different methods to better serve their own urban population with GIS.  Specifically they sought to propose a GIS based method to determine optimal locations for bike-share stations, main characteristics and accessibility of each station.

In their work they had 5 different models – 100, 200, 300, 400 and 500 fixed ratios of stations per 1000 inhabitants, but also had 52 set stations no matter which model was being tested near the train and Metro stations. They layered the GIS to include populations of work buildings, pedestrian traffic and neighborhood populations to maximize bike station accessibility.

Their proposed method was applied in Madrid to work with local MyBici proposed project. They showed their results with the 5 different models – ranging from 100-500 stations and when the usage changed.  They found in a maximize coverage model that accessibility to stations increases significantly until the 100-200 station mark when the stations become saturated and accessibility drops to less than 8% between the next model.

“Optimizing the location of stations in bike-sharing programs: A GIS approach.” Applied Geography (35):235-246. J.C. Garcia-Palomares, J. Gutierrez and M. Latorre (2012).