My name is Wei Lu, a 2nd year Master student in Geography at McMaster University. My research is to explore the efficiency of cyclists’ routes with the help of Dr. Ron Dalumpines and my supervisor Dr. Darren Scott.

A bike share program named Social Bicycles Hamilton (SoBi Hamilton) provides all the global positioning system (GPS) data for us. It offers 750 bicycles equipping with GPS devices and over 100 hubs. We created a dataset containing 161,426 GPS trajectories describing observed routes of SoBi cyclists over a 12-month period (April 1, 2015 to March 31, 2016) using a map-matching toolkit.

We’ve already grouped trips by origin-destination hub pairs and we’re now modifying an old GIS-based toolkit (that originally was designed for car) to generate multiple route attributes for exploring determinants of bicyclist route choice behavior. Then, the most popular routes between hubs will be compared with their shortest path counterparts based on distance. Finally, multivariate regression may be used to identify attributes that make bicyclists choose to detour from shortest paths.

I’m halfway through this study, and I will post an update when I get some significant results.