A case study of the relationship among air quality and rental activities of public bicycle-sharing system in Taipei

Public Bicycle-sharing System (PBS) has been developed for a decade and has become one of the public transportation systems in Taiwan. The usage of the PBS in outdoor environment is certainly affected by the weather condition. In recent years, the high concentration of particulate matter (PM) pollution occurs more and more often and is drawing people's attention in Taiwan. The study investigated the relationship between the air quality and the rental activities of PBS in Taipei. Location Aware Sensor System Airbox (LASS-Airbox) sensors' records are served as the air quality. The spatio-temporal rental data of PBS in Taipei are served as the rental activities. LASS-Airbox is a tiny-and-connected sensor that detects and records the concentration of PM2.5, temperature and humidity. These data are open to the public and can be accessed directly from the Internet. The spatio-temporal rental data of PBS records every rental event, such as the rent time, the rent station, the return time, the return station and the usage time. The rental frequency at each PBS station in an hour is derived from the above data. The PBS rental activities in Taipei from January to October, 2017 are studied in this research. The Poisson regression method is applied to find the correlation between the air quality and rental activities. The results are as follows: 1. The concentration of PM2.5 presents positively correlated at all seasons. 2. Humidity presents negatively correlated at all seasons. 3. Wind speed presents negatively correlated at winter and spring, but positive correlated at summer and autumn. 4. Temperature presents negatively correlated at summer and fall, but positive correlated at winter and spring.