Spatial and Temporal Characteristic Analysis of Imbalance Usage in the Hangzhou Public Bicycle System

Calculating the availability of bicycles and racks is a traditional method for detecting imbalance usage in a public bicycle system (PBS). However, for bike-sharing systems in Asian countries, which have compact layouts and larger system scales, an alternative docking station may be found within walking distance. In this paper, we proposed a synthetic and spatial-explicit approach to discover the imbalance usage by using the Hangzhou public bicycle system as an example. A spatial filter was used to remove the false-alarm docking stations and to obtain true imbalance areas of interest (AOI), where the system operation department installs more stations or increases the capacity of existing stations. In addition, sub-nearest neighbor analysis was adopted to determine the average distance between stations, resulting in an average station spacing of 190 m rather than 15.5 m, which can reflect the nonbiased service level of Hangzhou's public bicycle systems. Our study shows that neighboring stations are taken into account when analyzing PBSs that use a staggered or face-to-face layout, and our method can reduce the number of problematic stations that need to be reallocated by about 92.81%.</p>