Lessons Learnt from the analysis of a bike sharing system

Bike-sharing systems have been deployed in many major cities around the world today. Bike sharing systems provide great advantages as a mean of urban public transportation facilitating a green solution for daily commuters and tourists. Users tend to use more often this type of transportation for their daily needs. The key to success for such systems is the efficient distribution of bikes among the bike stations in order to satisfy high user demands. Existing schemes in the literature focus either on predicting the bike station demand and modeling user mobility mainly focusing on making cycling more accessible to people, or on minimizing the costly and time-consuming movement of bikes among the stations while the system is in use. In this work our objective is to gain insights into the usage of bike sharing systems and in particular the pick-up and drop-off operations. Our goal is to get a better understanding of the bike mobility patterns and identify the key factors that lead to imbalances in the distribution of the bikes at the stations, towards creating effective and sustainable bike sharing systems.