Exploring the Spatial-Temporal Characteristics of Traditional Public Bicycle Use in Yancheng, China: A Perspective of Time Series Cluster of Stations

Abstract

Traditional dock-based public bicycle systems continue to dominate cycling in most cities, even though bicycle-sharing services are an increasingly popular means of transportation in many of China’s large cities. A few studies investigated the traditional public bicycle systems in small and mid-sized cities in China. The time series clustering method’s advantages for analyzing sequential data used in many transportation-related studies are restricted to time series data, thereby limiting applications to transportation planning. This study explores the characteristics of a typical third-tier city’s public bicycle system (where there is no bicycle-sharing service) using station classification via the time series cluster algorithm and bicycle use data. A dynamic time warping distance-based k-medoids method classifies public bicycle stations by using one-month bicycle use data. The method is further extended to non-time series data after format conversion. The paper identified three clusters of stations and analyzed the relationships between clusters’ features and the stations’ urban environments. Based on points-of-interest data, the classification results were validated using the enrichment factor and the proportional factor. The method developed in this paper can apply to other transportation analysis and the results also yielded relevant strategies for transportation development and planning.