The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg is increasingly taking a data-based approach to transport planning. During the MegaBITS project, the city's capabilities were expanded to include analyses of transport volumes for bike sharing and other micromobility data.
The most recent data set available to the city's transport planners is an enhanced dataset of the city's bike-sharing system, StadtRad, provided by DB Connect. This data is available via the Mobililty Data Specification (MDS), a data standard for the sharing and micromobility economy. It provides not only station-based rental information but also bike movements between two stations when a bike is rented. Therefore, transport planners have access to key figures on bike movements, such as the number of trips, average travel distance, and travel time. Additionally, these metrics can be evaluated in the context of the associated origin-destination pairs, including a distinction between different administrative spatial levels.
In addition, the data contains the trip trajectories of, measured as a sequence of GPS points. This provides the opportunity to go a step further and analyse which infrastructure is actually being used by rented bikes and other microbility services, such as e-scooters. This is done via a predefined algorithm that matches the GPS-trajectory points of the trip to the most likely segment of the designated transport network map.
However, this map-matching process is quite challenging: an appropriate network has to be defined, which contains roads, bike, and foot paths, and is neither too detailed nor too sparse to match the requirements of the GPS-data. Another complication arises from the accuracy of the available GPS data. The GPS measurements are sparse and noisy due to the city's building structures and the low frequency of their recording. A thoughtful approach to data handling is required to achieve a reliable outcome that can serve as a basis for future data-driven decision-making in the city of Hamburg. Transport volumes on the designated transport network will be publicly available data provided by the Urban Data Platform Hamburg in the future.
As part of the MegaBITS project, those two challenges were tackled and partly implemented by the Agency of Geoinformation and Surveying (Landesbetrieb für Geoinformation und Vermessung – LGV). All processing of this data by the LGV is fully GDPR-compliant. Furthermore, the origin-destination analysis was expanded to include e-scooter data to enhance understanding of micromobility user behaviour.
Additionally, planners have access to aggregated data from the use of the RAD+ app, which provides further perspectives on cycling activity with fully integrated origin destination analysis and their associated key figures and transport volumes on the self-defined transport network. In the future, this service is going to be improved due to the redefined transport network for map matching which is going to be provided by the Urban Data PlatformHamburg.
After three years, the MegaBITS project will end in April. During this time, the Hamburg pilot has provided important insights into the quality of Floating Bike Data (FBD) and has translated these findings into concrete applications. Together, the Ministry of Transport and Mobility Transition (Behörde für Verkehr und Mobilitätswende – BVM), the Agency for Roads, Bridges and Waters (Landesbetrieb Straßen, Brücken und Gewässer – LSBG), and the LGV have achieved, among other things, the following:
- Improvement of Hamburg's transport model regarding bicycle traffic and e-scooter volumes
- Development of an impact analysis for "green waves" in bicycle traffic
- Support for planning through the integration of RAD+ data into the city's data systems
Conclusion: The combination of innovative data use and methodological advances provides a solid foundation for strategic decisions regarding bicycle traffic. Hamburg demonstrates how modern transport planning can be data-driven, evidence-based, and future-oriented.
Photo by ECI.
Find or showcase connected mobility solutions for free in the BITS Directory .