Optimizing Bike Sharing Systems: Dynamic Prediction Using Machine Learning and Statistical Techniques and Rebalancing
The large increase in on-road vehicles over the years has resulted in cities facing challenges in providing high-quality transportation services. Traffic jams are a clear sign that cities are overwhelmed, and that current transportation networks and systems cannot accommodate the current demand without a change in policy, infrastructure, transportation modes, and commuter mode choice. In response to this problem, cities in a number of countries have started putting a threshold on the number of vehicles on the road by deploying a partial or complete ban on cars in the city center. For example, in Oslo, leaders have decided to completely ban privately-owned cars from its center by the end of 2019, making it the first European city to totally ban cars in the city center. Instead, public transit and cycling will be supported and encouraged in the banned-car zone, and hundreds of parking spaces in the city will be replaced by bike lanes. As a government effort to support bicycling and offer alternative transportation modes, bike-sharing systems (BSSs) have been introduced in over 50 countries. BSSs aim to encourage people to travel via bike by distributing bicycles at stations located across an area of service. Residents and visitors can borrow a bike from any station and then return it to any station near their destination. Bicycles are considered an affordable, easy-to-use, and, healthy transportation mode, and BSSs show significant transportation, environmental, and health benefits. As the use of BSSs have grown, imbalances in the system have become an issue and an obstacle for further growth. Imbalance occurs when bikers cannot drop off or pick-up a bike because the bike station is either full or empty. This problem has been investigated extensively by many researchers and policy makers, and several solutions have been proposed. There are three major ways to address the rebalancing issue: static, dynamic and incentivized. The incentivized approaches make use of the users in the balancing efforts, in which the ...