VoxPop - Advanced analytics to gather actionable insights to the city of Lisbon.
Firstly, CML, EMEL, CARRIS, Metropolitano de Lisboa and Transportes Metropolitanos de Lisboa (TML), defined challenges in their organisations related to mobility – e.g., is Lisbon´s bike-sharing system (GIRA) being used by public transport users as a last-mile solution. Secondly, partners identified a set of analytics to investigate those challenges, the data required to conduct the analytics and sources for these data.
A key goal of VoxPop is to promote good practices of sharing data between public and private organisations. Since most of the data required belong to the partner entities named above, this identification of sources is crucial to explore the data sharing and start conversations.
One of the challenges that EMEL is addressing is how can improve the current service of the bike-sharing system GIRA to meet our customers’ needs. The goal is to better understand GIRA users to ultimately offer a better service. EMEL has been building several analytics to address this challenge. One analytic is focused on understanding the behaviour and habits of different GIRA customer profiles.
Currently, EMEL is focused on building customer profiles based on their demand patterns. The idea is to categorise the types of GIRA customers based on the services and/or amenities in the surroundings of the bike stations where customers start and end their journey, as well as the pattern – when exists – of their journeys. We are also considering transport accessibility through the existence (or not) of train, underground and buses.
Additionally, EMEL is also conducting another analytic to define clusters of bike stations based on transport accessibility as well as the land use at the stations’ surroundings. By doing so, we will be able to assess which bike stations are better served in terms of accessibility, in terms of land use in the surroundings and both. Based in this analysis and the customers’ profile, we will be able to support the decision-making process regarding the plan the expansion of the current network with a better information which identifies the areas of need.
Moreover, EMEL is also working to understand the role of weather on user behaviour. Whenever the weather involves unfavourable conditions, such as rain, people tend to cycle less, at least in Portugal. Therefore, we are analysing the effect of rainy days in GIRA demand. The results suggest that whenever it rains, the number of customers using GIRA decrease significantly. On the opposite side, we noticed that as the temperature rises so does the number of customers using GIRA. Understanding this correlation is important to, for instance, planning maintenance operations of the system considering the moments when demand is lower than usual.
In addition, EMEL also is trying to understand the desired paths of GIRA users and to do so, we used the users’ routes (each bike has its own GPS) and overlap that with the existing cycle lanes (figure presented above). By doing so, we are able to notice what could be evidence that users avoid some cycle lanes due to the characteristics of the infrastructure and choose others that provide them the feel of being secured. Moreover, we were also able to notice streets constantly used by GIRA users even without cycle lanes. This helps to plan future expansions of the city´s cycling network.
Digital transition
