Urban cycles and mobility patterns: Exploring and predicting trends in a bicycle-based public transport system

This paper provides an analysis of human mobility data in an urban area using the amount of available bikes in the stations of the community bicycle program Bicing in Barcelona. Based on data sampled from the operator's website, it is possible to detect temporal and geographic mobility patterns within the city. These patterns are applied to predict the number of available bikes for any station some minutes/hours ahead. The predictions could be used to improve the bicycle program and the information given to the users via the Bicing website. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.