Measuring the Pulse of the City through Shared Bicycle Programs

Abstract

City-wide urban infrastructures are increasingly reliant on networked technology to improve and expand their services. As a side effect of this digitalization, large amounts of data can be sensed and analyzed to uncover patterns of human behavior. In this paper, we sense and analyze data from a new type of urban infrastructure called shared bicycling. We provide a spatio-temporal analysis of six weeks of usage data from Barcelona's shared bicycling system called Bicing. We show how these digital traces can be used to uncover daily routines, cultural influences and the role of time and space in city dynamics. I.