I Want to Ride My Bicycle: Leveraging Mobike Data to Study Mobility in Padova, Italy

Pietro Rampazzo , Università Ca' Foscari - Venezia
Katherine Hoffman Pham, Stern School of Business New York University
Francesco Rampazzo, University of Oxford
Francesco Silvestri, University of Padova

With the rise of the sharing economy, more and more people are using shared services and goods rather than owning them. In particular, there has been an increase in the sharing of mobility, including shared car services, e-scooter platforms, and bike share systems. In this paper, we leverage data from Mobike, which is one of the most popular free floating bike sharing (FFBS) systems all over the world. Researchers have already started to use car sharing and FFBS data, however, not much attention has been given to repurposing these data sources to help cities plan bike routes and identify who are the users of the service. Focusing on Padova, a mid-size city in northeastern Italy, we present some preliminary results from descriptive analysis of the Mobike data. Mobike has been operating in Padova since May 2019. We aim to use cluster analysis to study the area in which most of the movements happen, as well as to provide information on the general characteristics of the users. Such data offer an opportunity for demographers to study small area estimation of the population, urban mobility, and night and day patterns of the population within a city. While this project uses a novel dataset on the city of Padova, the analysis could be scaled up using Mobike data from other cities.

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 Presented in Session P3. Poster Session Migration, Economics, Environment, Methods, History and Policy