Quantifying Bike Share Demand and Subsidy in Philadelphia
Jan - May 2018
Work with Shuhan Xu and Anbei Zhao
The concept of bike share has swept across the globe in just a few years. It is convenient, eco-friendly, and plays an important part in reducing traffic congestion. The bike share program is operated by Indego in Philadelphia. Now, most bike share stations are located around the Center City. The Bicycle Coalition of Greater Philadelphia is going to expand the bike share network, with a special focus on low-income communities to ensure a more sustainable and equitable bike share system.
Where will they put the next bike share station? Before we answer this question, we have to be clear about one thing: building bike share stations cost a lot. For example, it costs around $60000 dollars to build a bike share station with 15 docks and 8 bikes. Besides, there will be more than $15000 operation cost since the second year and thereafter.
To benefit more people in a fiscally sustainable way, we want to find locations with substantial bike share demand. So, how can we estimate the bike share demand citywide? In the past, the policy-makers usually evaluated site suitability by simply overlaying different criteria or based on their personal experience. Now, we want more accurate predictions of the trip count. In order to achieve this goal, we build predictive models to address the issue.
We have three highlights of our project. First, we want to predict bike share demand for every location in Philadelphia. To do this, we use 6 popular machine learning algorithms to build predictive models.
Second, based on the prediction results, we conduct the cost-benefit analysis to figure out the amount of cost to build a new bike share station and the associated revenue from the bike share trips.
Last, we devise a web app to visualize the results of our prediction and the cost-benefit analysis associated with our prediction. Hopefully, our tool will be useful in future bike-share planning processes.
