Estimating parameters of demand for trips by public bicycle system using GPS data

Abstract

Bicycles become one of the main modes of public transport in modern cities. In many cases, they replace private cars and even public buses, especially in the cities with the developed bicycle infrastructure. However, designing and developing public transport systems should be implemented on the grounds of known parameters of demand for travels. The paper describes an approach to the travel demand estimation with the use of data obtained from GPS trackers. The article mainly focuses on data cleaning procedures and the estimations of the demand parameters on the base of the obtained dataset. The authors propose the software for reading raw records from GPX-files and cleaning the data. The case study of the bicycle share system in Kraków, Poland, is discussed in the paper: the results of the data cleansing and estimating demand parameters for recreational trips allocated from the obtained sample are shown.