Browsing by Author "Troped, Philip"

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    The Indiana Pacers Bikeshare Program – An Opportunity to Explore Research Questions in Geography, Transportation, and Public Health
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Lulla, Vijay; Wilson, Jeffrey S.; Banerjee, Aniruddha; Troped, Philip
    The Indiana Pacers Bikeshare program is funded by the Herb and Simon Family Foundation and overseen by the Indianapolis Cultural Trail, Inc., (ICT) a non-profit organization which provides access to bikes for a small fee to travel around the Indianapolis downtown area. There are twenty six stations and 250 bikes collated across the Indianapolis downtown area. There are two ways of using the bikeshare: a 24-hour pass or an annual membership. A user is entitled to unlimited 30-minute rides during the duration of the pass or membership. Each bicycle is equipped with a GPS unit. B-Cycle, a company that handles the implementation of the bikeshare system, collects GPS data of trips when the bike is in motion. In collaboration with ICT, our research team has acquired data from initiation of the program in April 2014 to the end of 2015. The dataset is large with slightly over 13 million records. Our research team is planning, at least, four projects based on this dataset: evaluating associations between built environment and bike use patterns, estimating physical activity accumulated during bikeshare use, differences in use by different membership types, and optimal placement of existing stations and planning for expansion of new stations.
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    Relocating Bike-Kiosks to Maximize Ridership – A Weighted Matching Optimization Problem
    (Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, 2016-04-08) Banerjee, Aniruddha; Lulla, Vijay; Wilson, Jeffrey S.; Troped, Philip
    Bike share infrastructure can benefit from optimized allocation of resources, such as bike share stations or kiosks that have relatively high capital costs. Suboptimal placement of stations increases the cost of service and may impede membership. If impedances like distance to kiosk is high then ridership may decrease thereby not allowing the system to reach its full potential. Currently, the 25 bike-share stations managed by the non-profit Indiana Pacers Bikeshare program are located around the Indianapolis downtown area and the Indianapolis Cultural Trail. We developed a weighted matching solution to minimize the distance potential users must travel to reach a kiosk while taking into account the pairing of existing kiosks with new locations. We also provide a model to introduce several new locations that restricts maximum distance traveled by customers to the nearest kiosk. For both, we apply integer programming heuristics to solve the optimization problem – an NP hard problem. NP hard problems are computationally prohibitive and require specialized mathematical programming for robust solutions. Analyses show that 20 optimally located kiosks will serve the 25 existing kiosks clientele without any increase in impedance to kiosk access – a 20 percent increase in efficiency.