With a keen interest in City of Vancouver initiatives, and as an avid cyclist, the implementation of the bike share in Vancouver this summer (2016) was a topic of personal interest to me. I had initially learned about it in my early teenage years, and it has been on my mind as I grew older as more bike lanes were being installed in the city. In my travels, I have used other bike shares that had already been implemented in other cities, including Seattle, Toronto, and Montreal. As a tourist, I found these bikes to be an incredible alternative to taxis or even buses, because it was a more interactive way of exploring the city than watching it pass by through a window. Bike shares are a convenient and accessible way to travel, and improves walkability, sustainability, and livability in the city. 

---

Project Proposal

In light of the Public Bike Share program about to be implemented in Vancouver this upcoming summer, we created a proposal to locate the best locations to install bike shares in the city.  A bike share is a public service in which individuals may rent bicycles on a short term basis and return the bike to any of the available share stations. Our main objective was to increase walkability, sustainability, and the use of public transportation. To achieve this, we evaluated and classified different criteria to locate areas of highest priority. Based on our criteria, we collected tabular and spatial data on bike lanes, popular bus stops, population density, popular tourist attractions, businesses, parks, schools, and roads. This data was then classified into 3 different levels of importance based on our hierarchy ranking system, to locate the most ideal locations for bike shares. We aimed to model this project based on City of Vancouver objectives, to create a more realistic proposal plan.

Project Management

Working with my group members, I came to my group with the idea to come up with a proposal to implement a bike share program in Vancouver. With my idea, we worked together to compile relevant data for our project. Throughout the project, I ensured that we had our main objectives for our project in mind at every step, and allocated tasks. I helped build the hierarchy system that we utilized to locate areas of most importance, as well as coming up with ideas to achieve our main objectives. In our analysis, I guided our group members on what was to be written in the final report, making sure everyone was up to date.

Project Process

In this project, I learned that data collection and planning is only a small part of the process of project planning. Throughout our project, I learned how to design creative methods on how we could achieve our various objectives. I gained experience on various skills, like problem solving, project management, and team work that I could utilize in future projects.

Some interesting GIS analysis techniques we implemented were related to walkability and the implementation of our hierarchy ranking system to determine the most ideal locations of bike shares. We created buffers of 20 metres around spatial data, like bus stops, to increase walkability from spatial features to bike shares. In our final map of bike share locations, we achieved increased connectivity between locations. By rating bus stop data and bike lane data as “Most Important”, the resulting bike share functioned more like a network, with bike lanes connecting separate locations together. The implementation of our ranking system proved to be more complicated as we moved forward in our project. We used intersect tools in ArcMap to remove redundant data and to join multiple layers of the same ranking together. To further visualize these areas, these layers were then coloured and placed on top of one another with 25% transparency so we could see the layering and give accurate scores.

Some issues we encountered, was that we were limited by our own technological resources and personal skills. We had originally wanted to create a “heat map” of locations, but we were limited by our inability to place values on entire data layers. Furthermore, with more resources, we could conduct a survey on popular bike share locations proposed by the citizens, to improve walkability, accessibility, and increased public transportation use.