Planning Bike Lanes based on Sharing-Bikes' Trajectories

Abstract

Cycling as a green transportation mode has been promoted by many governments all over the world. As a result, constructing effective bike lanes has become a crucial task for governments promoting the cycling life style, as well-planned bike paths can reduce traffic congestion and decrease safety risks for both cyclists and motor vehicle drivers. Unfortunately, existing trajectory mining approaches for bike lane planning do not consider key realistic government constraints: 1) budget limitations, 2) construction convenience, and 3) bike lane utilization. In this paper, we propose a data-driven approach to develop bike lane construction plans based on large-scale real world bike trajectory data. We enforce these constraints to formulate our problem and introduce a flexible objective function to tune the benefit between coverage of the number of users and the length of their trajectories. We prove the NP-hardness of the problem and propose greedy-based heuristics to address it. Finally, we deploy our system on Microsoft Azure, providing extensive experiments and case studies to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.