Evaluating Non-Motorized Transport Popularity of Urban Roads by Sports GPS Tracks

TL;DR

This paper proposes a data-driven p-index method to evaluate the popularity of urban roads for walking and biking using GPS track data, aiding urban planning in Chinese cities.

Contribution

It introduces a novel p-index based on GPS data to quantitatively assess non-motorized transport popularity in urban areas.

Findings

p-index effectively measures walkability and bikeability

Urban road popularity varies across different times of day

Method applied successfully to Wuhan city data

Abstract

Non-motorized transport is becoming increasingly important in urban development of cities in China. How to evaluate the non-motorized transport popularity of urban roads is an interesting question to study. The great amount of tracking data generated by smart mobile devices give us opportunities to solve this problem. This study aims to provide a data driven method for evaluating the popularity (walkability and bikeability) of urban non-motorized transport system. This paper defines a p-index to evaluate the popular degree of road segments which is based on the cycling, running, and walking GPS track data from outdoor activities logging applications. According to the p-index definition, this paper evaluates the non-motorized transport popularity of urban area in Wuhan city within different temporal periods.