Source-linked AI summary
Characterizing the speed and paths of shared bicycles in Lyon
Pablo Jensen, Jean-Baptiste Rouquier, Nicolas Ovtracht, Céline Robardet
TL;DR
The paper characterizes urban bicycle behavior using Vélo'v trip data and examines speed and route length in Lyon. It finds that bicycles can outperform cars downtown through relatively high speeds and shorter paths.
Problem
Urban bicycle behavior and transportation efficiency require robust evidence from real-world trips, including speed and route characteristics.
Method
The study analyzes Vélo'v records containing trip locations, times, and measured distances across Lyon's shared bicycle network.
Results
Bikes reach 13.5 km/h for average users during morning rush hours, about 15 km/h after accounting for shorter trips, while 68.2% of qualifying trips are shorter than car routes.
Takeaways & Limitations
In downtown Lyon, bicycles can be faster than cars by combining high speed with shorter paths.
Takeaways & Limitations
The interpretation of higher Wednesday speeds is speculative and may reflect a higher proportion of faster masculine bikers.
Abstract
from arXiv · showhide
Thanks to numerical data gathered by Lyon's shared bicycling system Vélo'v, we are able to analyze 11.6 millions bicycle trips, leading to the first robust characterization of urban bikers' behaviors. We show that bicycles outstrip cars in downtown Lyon, by combining high speed and short paths.These data also allows us to calculate Vélo'v fluxes on all streets, pointing to interesting locations for bike paths.