Effectiveness of small scale bike sharing systems according to the analysis of turnover station ratios

Resumen

Many studies about Bike Sharing Systems (BSS) show the good performance of these schemes when bicycles are highly used on a daily basis. Most of them analyse large cities such as Washington D.C., Melbourne, London, Barcelona or Dublin, which have more than 500,000 inhabitants. Nevertheless, studies on BSS in small cities with a population between 20,000 and 100,000 inhabitants are still undeveloped. This paper is focused on BSSs in small cities with the aim of shedding light on how to improve BSS performance in small cities based on current experiences. More precisely, the paper analyses how the BSSs of two Irish cities, Limerick and Galway, have worked during the first two years of implementation (2015-2016). It is focused on the effectiveness of the stations using the Turnover Station ratio, which measures the usage degree of each station. This analysis will allow the identification of the stations working correctly, which stations need a deep study to improve its resources (bikes and docks) and if some station should be removed. Moreover, these findings will result in increasing knowledge about the implementation and development of small scale BSSs. For example, some of the main results point out that to assess the success of these schemes in small cities, the daily basis for analysing the usage should be changed to a monthly basis, in order to consider an overview of the systems, and the differences between annual trips and temporary trips also affect the classification of stations according to the turnover ratio.