This repository contains the code and intermediary data related to our paper titled "Efficiency and equity of the multimodal travel between public transit and bike-sharing accounting for multiscale". You can access the paper here.
As a supplement to the existing public transit system, bike-sharing is considered an effective solution to the "first mile" and "last mile" of travel. While many stakeholders believe that multimodal travel between public transit and bike-sharing can improve urban accessibility and sustainability, few studies have assessed the impact of bike-sharing on existing public transportation systems in terms of efficiency and equality. This research uses three months of mobile phone location data and about 140 million bike-sharing trips (origin-destination, OD) data from Shenzhen, China, to analyze first mile and last mile bike-sharing multimodal travel and measure the impact of bike-sharing on the existing public transportation system in terms of efficiency and equality at different scales. The research finds that bike-sharing is less effective in improving the operational efficiency of urban public transport and creates new inequalities at both global and local scales of the urban public transport system. Bike-sharing is only effective in tiny areas of the city and specific modes (subway-bike-sharing) and does not benefit groups with low socioeconomic levels and those living in edge areas of the city. Improving the equity and accessibility of public transportation is a key factor towards promoting sustainable urban development, and the analysis of this study on multimodal travel efficiency and inequality of bike-sharing can provide helpful insights for future sustainable urban planning.
We've developed an interactive visualization website for this study which can be accessed here.
The shared bike data was collected from Shenzhen Open Data Platform, available here. The data collection script can be found in shared_bike_data_downloader.py.
Additional analysis codes and intermediary process data will be made public upon the publication of the paper.