Measuring Changes in Bike Share Use: A Raster-Based, Open-Sourced, and Open-Data Approach

Keywords: raster; open source; bikeshare; equity
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 08:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 09:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 42

Abstract

As bike share use has grown exponentially over the last decades, it is essential that the benefits of bike share systems are distributed broadly across diverse groups, particularly among marginalized populations. Previous policy interventions have only had, at best, mixed results at growing the population of low income and/or minority bike share users, leaving planners in need of new knowledge to develop the equity reach of bike share systems. At the core, to best determine an equitable distribution of bike share’s resources it is necessary to advance new methods around where to site new bike share infrastructure. Additional inputs beyond the station-level unit of analysis are needed, even when analyzing bike share systems that lack more spatially nuanced data that comes from GPS tracking or dockless bicycles. It is necessary to consider where bike share travel happens and how this travel changes across populations groups and over time. In this paper, I put forward a raster-based geospatial approach to describe continuous surfaces of bike share utility at the route-level, and develop a map-algebra approach that measures changes in such utility based on key equity characteristics. I describe an open-sourced, open-data workflow that utilizes the case study of Philadelphia, PA’s IndeGo bike share system and interruptions caused by various points of the Covid-19 to measure utility change. I find that these continuous surfaces articulate a more diverse spatial area for intervention that might otherwise not be apparent when analyzed at the station level, or when utilizing strictly vector-based geospatial methods.