An optimization approach for the placement of bicycle-sharing stations to reduce short car trips: An application to the city of Seoul

Substantial motor vehicle exhaust, a primary cause of air pollution, is emitted on short car trips of three miles or less. Bicycles have been considered an optimum means of completing these short trips because the bicycle is an environmentally friendly, economical, and convenient vehicle. Accordingly, many countries have adopted public bicycle-sharing systems to reduce the use of private vehicles for short trips in central downtown areas. In this paper, we propose a new framework, based on taxi trajectory data, for locating bicycle-sharing stations most efficiently to replace short automobile trips. The proposed framework is applied to Gangnam-gu, a district within the city of Seoul, Korea. Results using two different location-allocation models are demonstrated. As expected, when the p-median model was implemented, the selected stations were more scattered over the whole district, whereas when the MCLP model was implemented, the stations were more concentrated on central areas. Our approach is applicable to any city considering a bicycle-sharing system and can contribute to the system’s efficiency in improving environmental conditions in a central downtown area.