Map: Where to Put a Bike Share in Vancouver

Our MCE classes (white to black), show the places with the highest demand for bike stations, and so you can see we have chosen different densities for the bike stations at the different classes.

At s first glance, it looks really dense in the centre with the yellow Canada line station running through it. This is because it is one of the areas with the highest need for public bikes. Here, bikes are stationed at about 300m apart. It looks really dense right? Well take a look at Vancouver Mobi’s bike share density in down town here:

A screen shot from Mobi Bike Share’s website: https://www.mobibikes.ca/en#the-map

You’ll notice that in certain places, they have more than one bike station on the same block! This also reflects other bike share station locations in other cities, as confirmed by the study by Castillo-Manzano et al. (2016) which noted that most stations are ideally 300m apart. The study also noted that most bicycle rides  are around 20-30 minutes long (around 6km) which was the furthest distance in our analysis, noting that though the areas in dark blue were the least desirable location, having stations in those extents are still useful for users.

Because of how we chose our, weights, access to rapid transit was very important to us and can be seen reflected on our map. Our downtown area is not half as a dense as we aimed for coverage and analyzed at a smaller scale encompassing the whole city of Vancouver. For usability, Mobi’s distribution would be far better for commuters aiming to get to work and to park near their workplaces, while we aimed for economic coverage.

Additionally, while the method in selecting the station locations through measuring distances by cell size relates to our analysis in ideal station distances based on research by Tree Hugger (2013) and Castillo-Manzano et al. (2016) and matches the results of the MCE, the lack of ArcGIS tools for spreading out points to a certain distance naturally made the process difficult and potentially error-ridden. Further research is needed on different analysis tools are available, such as the distances from a point tool, but based on ArcGIS forums, many others have had issues with the lack of tools for spacing points based on a certain distance.