Equitable Bike Share Station Siting
Modeling where a future Houston bike share should place stations to balance ridership and equity.
For the University of Houston Provost Undergraduate Research Scholarship (PURS), advised by Donna Kacmar in the Hines College of Architecture, I developed a spatial methodology for siting a future Houston bike share system. After Houston BCycle shut down in 2024, the work asks how a new network could balance ridership density, efficiency, and the inclusion of low-income and minority communities. Using ArcGIS Network Analyst location-allocation against 2020 Census population, a theoretical network with the same number of stations as the 2021 system reached 197,385 residents within a five-minute walk, a 2.65x increase. I then built a custom equity score from ACS poverty, race and Hispanic origin, and vehicle-availability data, and re-ran the allocation to weight high-need neighborhoods, redistributing stations toward the East End, Third Ward, and Southeast Houston.
Highlights
- Modeled optimal station placement with ArcGIS Network Analyst location-allocation against 2020 Census population.
- A same-size theoretical network reached 197,385 residents within a 5-minute walk, 2.65x the 2021 BCycle system.
- Built a custom, population-normalized equity score from poverty, demographics, and vehicle access.
- Re-ran the allocation on the equity score to redistribute stations into underserved neighborhoods.