Category: Conferences

I attended a one-day workshop last week, hosted by IFSTTAR’s GERI Animatic research group at École des Ponts ParisTech just east of Paris. The workshop was on Bicycle Sharing Systems, and as I have recently been working with a couple of colleagues, Dr Martin Zaltz-Austwick and Dr James Cheshire, on research relating to bicycle sharing data, and mapping the systems currently live in various cities around the world, I was keen to attend, particular as the agenda was packed with interesting sounding talks.

My rush-hour commute through Paris proved to be slightly more traumatic than planned (I wonder if Parisian visitors find London Underground stations as confusing as I find those on the Paris metro?) but I arrived at the École des Ponts ParisTech in time to hear the workshop organiser introducing the sessions. First up was Pierre Borgnat talking about network analysis of Lyon’s system. I had seen a paper by him on Lyon before, and the popularity and density of Lyon’s system has allowed for a rich and interesting dataset for mining and community detection. The community detection has been done using both spatial and temporal variables. Pierre’s thorough and technical treatment of the data was backed up with some excellent mapping of the data, which you can see above and below.

Next up was Jon Froehlich. Jon’s talk was underpinned by a discussion of the different data sources and types available in the field. He focussed on temporal cluster analysis of the Barcelona bicycle sharing system (below) – a particularly interesting city for me as, along with London and Zurich, it is a case study for the EU project I have recently started working on, EUNOIA. Barcelona’s bicycle sharing system is not unlike London’s, in terms of its size, shape and usage characteristics – although the general downward slope of the city causes headaches for its operator. Jon gets bonus points for including not only a quote from this blog on his presentation, but Martin’s beautiful routed bike-flow animation for London, and Dr Jo Wood’s more recent bi-directional flow animation, again of London.

Etienne Côme, from the hosting school, was next on, with an analysis of the biggest system (outside of China) of all – the Vélib in Paris. The Vélib is perhaps the holy grail of academic research in the field as its size, and Paris’s multiple commercial and residential zones, means that community and network analysis is likely to be eye-opening. Similar to Pierre, Etienne outlined eight detected communities, by looking at temporal variations in the origin-matrix between the 1200-odd stations on the Vélib network.

After lunch, Vincent Aguilera was first on, with a switch away from bicycle sharing systems but showing some techniques that have potential for the field – Vincent looked at using mobile phone network data to detect station dwell times and true journey durations on a section of the RER metro in Paris. He compared this data with Twitter messages with appropriate hashtags (below), and the real-time running supplied by the operator on its website. The availability and structure of the cell-towers on the network allowed a direct comparison to be made – indeed, such data may actually be of better quality than that currently available at the operator’s disposal, allowing more fine-tuned operation and monitoring.

Neal Lathia was next with a look at London’s system – specially effects caused by the addition of casual (i.e. non-key, non-member) availability in December 2010. The additional option did see some changes in the usages of certain docking stations. The comparison was done by clustering the network’s docking stations by time, before and after the transition, and then seeing which stations changed cluster. One of the main areas of change was in the very heart of London, around the Trafalgar Square area, suggesting a slight shift away from the (still dominating) railway station-based usage patterns.

Fabio Pinelli’s talk was wide-ranging – it included system design, routing for Dublin’s (over)used system, a look at the reliability of the Vélib fleet.

Finally, Francis Papon from the hosting school took a step back from the modern electronically managed bicycle sharing systems and mobile/social data sources, and looked at change in uses of urban cycling more generally. His dataset stretched over a hundred years, rather than the typically five-year maximum historical range that bicycle sharing systems have. A key trend is that in the largest French cities studied, including Paris, there is a recent (post-2000) renaissance in urban cycling usage, but this is not matched in many of the country’s smaller cities.

The workshop concluded with a general discussion of the research field to date and its direction. What was particularly interesting was that several bike sharing operators were in attendance, they were fully engaged with the academic research being carried out, asking questions but also revealing some nuggets of information about how the systems are rebalanced, relative costs of operations and why they thought some systems were more successful than others.

Hopefully there will be more such workshops in the future in Europe – with UCL CASA, Cambridge, City University London and LSHTM all involved in the field, maybe there should be one taking place in London next year?

I was in Vancouver at the end of June for the Velo-City conference – which is the cycling industry’s conference on bike sharing and urban cycling.

The lead sponsors were PBSC who are behind the technology for many of the larger North American systems (Montreal, Minneapolis, Washington DC) so there was was a strong bike sharing theme through the conference, and they had a prominent stand with bikes in the various scheme liveries. The stand also had a couple of design updates from the ones you see in London and elsewhere – a “totem-pole” for capturing sunlight to provide power, and a slots that takes credit cards as well as the existing key-fobs. There is no indication that these updates will be making it to London anytime soon though. B-Cycle, who supply and run many of the smaller systems in the US (e.g. Denver, San Antonio) also had a stand with their own Trek-built bikes, which have a distinctly different look.

I presented on my Bike Sharing Map showing the detail for various cities around the world, it was the middle part of a 90 minute presentation at three geographical scales – the first segment given by Russell Meddin on his global map of bike shares, and the last segment being given by Andrea Beatty on detailed information available for a single city through mobile apps.

I also sat in on several other presentations – some of the most interesting being given by far-eastern presenters, particularly the Chinese. This is because China has 7 of the largest 10 bike sharing systems in the whole world, but getting information on them can be difficult, so it was interesting to find out the information from people on the ground.

One of the most interesting talks focused on the modal shift in Chinese and Western cities – many of the former are shifting from bicycle to car, while the rise of the bus in Western cities was cited by the contrast between Thatcher’s 1968 “A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure” with the 2008 appearance of a red London bus in Beijing during the 2008 Olympics closing ceremony! In China, lanes that were once dedicated for bicycles have been turned over to extra space for cars.

My personal highlight was being able to borrow one of the PBSC bikes and take it for a spin around Stanley Park – a lovely circuit and on a very pleasant afternoon. Apparently Vancouver does not have very many rain free days in the summer, but it was warm and sunny throughout my stay.

Vancouver is itself getting a bike sharing system, probably next summer. Vancouver’s existing cycle insfrastructure is brilliant – properly segregated cycle lane, with planters and cycle parking to separate the lanes from the cars. The operator will have its work cut out for the scheme to be a success though – helmets are required by law in Vancouver. There was some talk of a system where every docking station comes with a helmet vending machine, and on return the helmet gets safety-checked and automatically cleaned ready for the next user.

Thanks to Russell and Paul for letting me crash in the apartment they rented, B-Cycle for covering my conference fee, and CASA for flying me there.

[Updated] I’ll be presenting at Velo-City in Vancouver later this week. Velo-City is the “world’s premier cycling planning conference”. It is likely to have a significant bike-sharing flavour – the lead sponsor being PBSC which designed the 6000-odd “Boris Bikes” (aka Barclays Cycle Hire bikes) that are a distinctive sight in central London, as well as equivalent systems in Montreal, Washington DC, Minneapolis, Boston and (shortly) New York City – known generically as Bixi bikes. Vancouver does not have a bike-sharing system of its own, but PBSC have imported a whole load of their Montreal bikes for delegates to borrow for the week, although a recent collar-bone break means I unfortunately won’t be taking up the offer. I did however spot a PBSC/Bixi bike “in the wild” in Vancouver’s beautiful Stanley Park – see above.

I’ll be talking about some new insights into bike-sharing cities worldwide that have been revealed by my Bike Share Map, as part of a three-part presentation on looking at bike-sharing cities at different scales – my co-presenters being the author of the Bike Sharing World Map, and the software developer behind the B-Cycle bike sharing systems.

My presentation is on Wednesday morning (Pacific time) and I’ll write/tweet about it on the day, wifi-access permitting.

To prepare for the presentation, I’ve added a few new cities to the Bike Share Map: Suzhou, Zhongshan, Wujiang, Shaoxing and Heihe in China; and Kanazawa in Japan. One early insight coming from these new maps could be that the Chinese really do work hard (if you excuse the gross overgeneralisation) – typically 11 hours between morning and evening commuter peaks, and seven days a week!

Hehei is shown below – it’s right on the Russian border, opposite a much larger Russian city – hence the Cyrillic (although no bridges across the river near there!)

Note that, in the maps of the Chinese systems, the docking station locations are slightly misaligned with the background maps because of location obfuscation carried out by that country – I’m using OpenLayers rather than the Chinese-based map service that corrects for the errors. The resulting offset is typically only 1-400m though so you can still get a good idea of the shape and size of each system.