Bikeshare Pool Sizing for Bike-and-Ride Multimodal Transit

In shared bike-and-ride transit systems, commuters use shared bicycles for last-mile transport between transit stations and home, and between transit stations and work locations. This requires pools of bicycles to be located near each transit stop where commuters can drop off and pick up shared bikes. We study the optimal sizing of such bicycle pools. While various problems related to vehicle pool sizing have been studied before, to the best of our knowledge this is the first paper that considers a multimodal transportation system with a regularly scheduled public transportation backbone and shared bicycles for the first and last mile. We present two solutions that guarantee bicycle availability with high probability, and we empirically verify their effectiveness using Monte Carlo simulations. Compared to a baseline solution, our techniques reduce the size of the bikeshare pool at the public transit station from 39% to 75% in the tested scenarios. © 2000-2011 IEEE.