Determining the optimal locations for bike-sharing stations: methodological approach and application in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece

Abstract Bike-sharing systems are an important part of many cities’ transportation systems and they are constantly being introduced in more and more cities worldwide. Thus, the strategic decisions for these systems are essential both for their successful operation and the efficient operation of cities’ transportation systems. The present paper aims to develop a methodological approach for determining the optimal locations for installing bike-sharing stations, taking into account the operators’ perspective. Through the developed methodological approach, it is sought to select locations which maximize the demand and the area (built environment) coverage and at the same time minimize the needs for bike redistribution within the day. Thus, the optimal selection of locations for bike-sharing stations is being set as a multi-objective optimization problem. The proposed methodological approach is being applied in the city of Thessaloniki, Greece, where a dock-based and a dockless bike-sharing system operate. The results indicate that the selected stations slightly vary based on the assigned weights in each of the three objectives; higher weight in the demand coverage objective results in more selected stations close to the city’s waterfront where bicycling demand is higher, while higher weight in the area coverage results in more selected stations in the inner city.