Using city-bike stopovers to reveal spatial patterns of urban attractiveness

Abstract

We demonstrate how digital traces of city-bike trips may become useful to identify urban space attractiveness. We exploit their unique feature–stopovers: short, non-traffic-related stops made by cyclists during their trips. As we demonstrate with the case study of Kraków (Poland), when applied to a big dataset, meaningful patterns appear, with hotspots (places with long and frequent stopovers) identified at both the top tourist and leisure attractions as well as emerging new places. We propose a generic method, applicable to any spatiotemporal city-bike traces, providing results meaningful to understand the general urban space attractiveness and its dynamics. With the proposed filtering (to mitigate a selection bias) and empirical cross-validation (to rule-out false-positive classifications) results effectively reveal spatial patterns of urban attractiveness. Valuable for decision-makers and analysts to enhance understanding of urban space consumption patterns by tourists and residents.