Better cycling - better life: social media based parametric modeling advancing governance of public transportation system in St. Petersburg

Abstract

City government is compelled to balance between improving quality of urban life of its citizens and reducing costs for managing urban infrastructures. Our article presents a novel tool that allows authorities to enhance management of public transportation, which is one of the crucial components of quality of urban life, and at the same time, provides ways to avoid unnecessary expenses. This tool is parametric modeling based on social media data. The case study presented here is parametric modeling of bike-sharing infrastructure in St. Petersburg. We show how multi-criteria parametric model based on user-generated georeferenced posts allows city government to find optimal locations to place bike stations in the city streets, increase the flow of bike users and satisfy more needs.