Inferring bike trip patterns from bike sharing system open data

Understanding bike trip patterns in a bike sharing system is important for researchers designing models for station placement and bike scheduling. By bike trip patterns, we refer to the large number of bike trips observed between two stations. However, due to privacy and operational concerns, bike trip data are usually not made publicly available. In this paper, instead of relying on time-consuming surveys and inaccurate simulations, we attempt to infer bike trip patterns directly from station status data, which are usually public to help riders find nearby stations and bikes. However, the station status data do not contain information about where the bikes come from and go to, therefore the same observations on stations might correspond to different underlying bike trips. To address this challenge, We conduct an empirical study on a sample bike trip dataset to gain insights about the inner structure of bike trips. We then formulate the trip inference problem as an ill-posed inverse problem, and propose a regularization technique to incorporate the a priori information about bike trips to solve the problem. We evaluate our method using real-world bike sharing datasets from Washington, D.C. Results show that our method effectively infers bike trip patterns.