Transactions on Transport Sciences 2025, 16(1):4-13 | DOI: 10.5507/tots.2024.019

A comparative study of gravity models to assess the evolution of urban bicycle mobility

Bertrand Jouvea, Paul Rochetb, Mohamadou Salifouab
a. LISST, University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès, CNRS, University of Toulouse
b. Federation ENAC ISAE-SUPAERO ONERA, University of Toulouse, France

Gravity models are extensively used tools to understand mobility, providing an approximation of the volume of a flow as a function of distance and population density. In particular, specific gravity models have been proposed in the literature for studying the bike sharing systems (BSS) in urban areas. In this paper, we show how robustness to scale change in data pre-processing can be used as a criterion to select the best model for BSS usage, in addition to the usual criteria of quality of fit. In a second stage, the study of the recent evolution of BSS uses in large cities via a dynamical application of gravity models over rolling time windows. Exploiting the good interpretability of gravity models, this methodology produces a time series for each parameter, that can be analysed to study the evolution of local policies and users' habits.

Keywords: gravity model; urban mobility; robustness; time series; bike sharing system

Received: July 12, 2024; Revised: July 12, 2024; Accepted: September 24, 2024; Prepublished online: December 2, 2024; Published: April 26, 2025  Show citation

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Jouve, B., Rochet, P., & Salifou, M. (2025). A comparative study of gravity models to assess the evolution of urban bicycle mobility. Transactions on Transport Sciences, 16(1), 4-13. doi: 10.5507/tots.2024.019
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