Effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on bike-sharing demand and hire time: Evidence from Santander Cycles in London.
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ABSTRACT:
SUBMITTER: Heydari S
PROVIDER: S-EPMC8639062 | biostudies-literature |
REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature
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Project description:Bike-sharing systems (BSS) have widely spread over many cities in the world as an environmentally friendly means to reduce air pollution and traffic congestion. This paper focuses on the bike-sharing rebalancing problem (BRP), which consists of two aspects: determining desired demands at each station and designing routes to redistribute bikes among stations. For the first task, we firstly apply the random forest, a very efficient machine learning algorithm, to forecast desired demands for each station, which can be easily implemented with distributed computing. For the second task, it belongs to the broad class of the vehicle routing problem with pickup and delivery (VRPPD). In most existing settings, all of the demands being strictly satisfied can lead to longer routes and add operational costs. In this paper, we propose a new model with unserved demands by relaxing demands satisfying constraints. Then, we design a distributed ant colony optimization (ACO) based algorithm with some specific modifications to increase its efficiency for the proposed model. We propose to use the percentage of average cost saving per bike as a metric to evaluate the performance of our method on cost-reducing and compare with existing methods and best-known values. Computational results on benchmarks show the advantage of our approach. Finally, we provide a real case study of BSS in Hangzhou, China, with insightful elaborations.
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Project description:ObjectiveTo model the impacts of the bicycle sharing system in London on the health of its users.DesignHealth impact modelling and evaluation, using a stochastic simulation model.SettingCentral and inner London, England.Data sourcesTotal population operational registration and usage data for the London cycle hire scheme (collected April 2011-March 2012), surveys of cycle hire users (collected 2011), and London data on travel, physical activity, road traffic collisions, and particulate air pollution (PM2.5, (collected 2005-12).Participants578,607 users of the London cycle hire scheme, aged 14 years and over, with an estimated 78% of travel time accounted for by users younger than 45 years.Main outcome measuresChange in lifelong disability adjusted life years (DALYs) based on one year impacts on incidence of disease and injury, modelled through medium term changes in physical activity, road traffic injuries, and exposure to air pollution.ResultsOver the year examined the users made 7.4 million cycle hire trips (estimated 71% of cycling time by men). These trips would mostly otherwise have been made on foot (31%) or by public transport (47%). To date there has been a trend towards fewer fatalities and injuries than expected on cycle hire bicycles. Using these observed injury rates, the population benefits from the cycle hire scheme substantially outweighed harms (net change -72 DALYs (95% credible interval -110 to -43) among men using cycle hire per accounting year; -15 (-42 to -6) among women; note that negative DALYs represent a health benefit). When we modelled cycle hire injury rates as being equal to background rates for all cycling in central London, these benefits were smaller and there was no evidence of a benefit among women (change -49 DALYs (-88 to -17) among men; -1 DALY (-27 to 12) among women). This sex difference largely reflected higher road collision fatality rates for female cyclists. At older ages the modelled benefits of cycling were much larger than the harms. Using background injury rates in the youngest age group (15 to 29 years), the medium term benefits and harms were both comparatively small and potentially negative.ConclusionLondon's bicycle sharing system has positive health impacts overall, but these benefits are clearer for men than for women and for older users than for younger users. The potential benefits of cycling may not currently apply to all groups in all settings.
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