Designing bike networks using the concept of network clusters

In this paper, a novel method is proposed for designing a bike network in urban areas. Based on the number of taxi trips within an urban area, a weighted network is abstracted. In this network, nodes are the origins and destinations of taxi trips and the number of trips among them is abstracted as link weights. Data is extracted from the Taxi smart card system of a real city. Then, Communities i.e. clusters of this network are detected using a modularity maximization method. Each community contains the nodes with highest number of trips within the cluster and lowest number of trips with other clusters. Within each community, the nodes close enough to each other for being traveled by bicycle are detected as key points and some non-dominated bike network connecting these nodes are enumerated using a bi-objective optimization model. The total travel cost (distance or time) on the network and the path length are considered as objectives. The method is applied to Isfahan city in Iran and a total of seven regions with some non-dominated bike networks are proposed.