Characterizing Temporal Patterns of Intra-Urban Human Mobility in Bike-Sharing through Trip Analysis: A Case Study of Shanghai, China

Human mobility, encompassing the movement of individuals and/or groups across space and time, significantly impacts various aspects of society, with intra-urban mobility being a major research focus of scholars in diverse disciplines. Bike-sharing systems have become an alternatives in cities for achieving more sustainable transportation. Hence, bike-sharing-related data are considered an important data source to study intra-urban human mobility. To better understand human mobility in cities, it is essential to characterize the typical patterns involved in intra-urban human mobility. This paper mainly focuses on characterizing the temporal patterns of intra-urban human mobility on bike-sharing based on the trip information of the acquired bike-sharing data. To achieve this, on the one hand, we adopted an exploratory data analysis (EDA) method to describe the temporal patterns by performing exploratory analyses of bike-sharing trips. On the other hand, we used the continuous triangular model (CTM) to conduct multi-temporal-scale analysis of bike-sharing trips for further explorations of the temporal patterns where necessary. The data of bike-sharing trips in Shanghai, China, were adopted as the dataset for the case study. Generally, the study was conducted at two different levels: the trip level and the bike level. Specifically, at each level, the explorations were conducted from varying perspectives. According to the analyses, numerous meaningful temporal patterns were discovered, and several distinctive findings were acquired. The results of this study show the effectiveness of the EDA and CTM methods in characterizing temporal patterns of intra-urban human mobility, based on which potentially insightful information and suggestions can be provided to assist related actions.