Bicycle Parking Research in Barcelona: Our journey
Bicycle parking is a critical piece of cycling infrastructure that has received little attention from city planners.
Our research team at City Lab Barcelona has begun to study on-street bicycle parking, with the aim of generating foundational knowledge and improving the cycling experience.
In 2021, we collected basic data on bike parking occupancy and rotation rates in the 10 districts of Barcelona.
Our team repeatedly sampled bicycle parking locations throughout the city.
We were interested in measuring the number of bicycles parked in each location, and bicycle type (kid, dockless shared, abandoned, private).
We were also interested in the bicycle rotation, the duration and the occupancy evolution by time of the day.
For that reason, we observed the same spot various times per day, and used color stickers to mark new bicycles.
The color told us in which time slots the bicycle had been spotted.
This is how we got our first map of Barcelona's bicycle parking occupancy.
Average Bike Parking Occupancy.
The study allowed us to gain some insights on the topic. Nonethless, with our 163 observations, we were only covering a 4% of the total bicycle parking locations of the city of Barcelona.
This is why we reached out to an ongoing project called The Bicycle Parking Project.
That allowed us to report the occupancy of more than 400 bicycle parking locations.
How the observations look like in the app.
As we can observe, the characteristics of the data collected in each study are different. But, both datasets are extremely useful to understand the dynamics of bicycle parking.
The platform, that will integrate data from both datasets, will also allow users to add more data.
With the BiciZen citizen science project, we aim to conduct a census of all bicycle parking locations in Barcelona. This will generate a comprehensive picture of bicycle parking demand in the city.
Preview of how the data will be added in the future BiciZen app.
