What Makes a City Bikeable? A Study of Intercity and Intracity Patterns of Bicycle Ridership using Mobike Big Data Records

This paper examines how mass ridership data can help describe cities from the bikers' perspective. We explore the possibility of using the data to reveal general bikeability patterns in 202 major Chinese cities. This process is conducted by constructing a bikeability rating system, the Mobike Riding Index (MRI), to measure bikeability in terms of usage frequency and the built environment. We first investigated mass ridership data and relevant supporting data; we then established the MRI framework and calculated MRI scores accordingly. This study finds that people tend to ride shared bikes at speeds close to 10 km/h for an average distance of 2 km roughly three times a day. The MRI results show that at the street level, the weekday and weekend MRI distributions are analogous, with an average score of 49.8 (range 0–100). At the township level, high-scoring townships are those close to the city centre; at the city level, the MRI is unevenly distributed, with high-MRI cities along the southern coastline or in the middle inland area. These patterns have policy implications for urban planners and policy-makers. This is the first and largest-scale study to incorporate mobile bike-share data into bikeability measurements, thus laying the groundwork for further research.