Analysing Data Set of the Bike–Sharing System Demand with R Scripts: Mexico City Case

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to analyse the public database of the Mexico City’s bike sharing system known as Ecobici to compute the average travel time, the number of inbound and outbound trips in every stage, the number of trips to and from stations, and the number of incoming and outcoming bikes per ten–minute intervals per day. These pieces of information provide managers with insights about the time they need to rebalance the system, the traffic among all the stations, and the bikes’ deficit or surplus per stage per ten-minute intervals. Based on about 4.6 million trips from July 2014 to January 2015 (downloaded from the data laboratory of Mexico City), an R script is programmed to manage the amount of information to compute the mean travel time, the traffic among stations, and the number of inbound and outbound bikes. The R script is available to the public to allow the reader to carry out the same experiments with the 444 stations, given that in this paper the results of some stations are presented. The system has not been studied to know the information we provide. The known studies focus on the kind of users and their needs but in the system behaviour.