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As the population worldwide continues to age, providing improved mobility services for older people becomes increasingly crucial. In recent years, the maturation of bike sharing has led older people to progressively incorporate it into their everyday lives. In this study, station-based bike sharing (SBBS) and dockless bike sharing (DBS) are investigated in relation to older population mobility. This research relies on the fusion of multiple data sources, including SBBS and DBS trip records, point of interest (POI), and meteorological conditions in Nanjing, China. A zero-inflated negative binomial regression model is used to compare the travel behaviors among various age groups with the exposure variable. SBBS outperforms DBS in relation to age equity, while diverse travel behavior patterns are exhibited between the age groups. Although younger users are the majority of users, older users travel more frequently than younger users in bike sharing services. Also, older users are more likely to use shared bikes near the religious and health POIs, as well as in higher population density areas. This study provides beneficial insights into the transport equity and service improvement of bike sharing systems.

As an environment-friendly travel mode, dockless bike sharing (DBS) has recently become very popular in China. It is significant to quantitatively evaluate the environmental benefits of DBS. This paper estimated the carbon dioxide (CO2) emission reduction of DBS by combining the one-month journey data of Hellobike, the DBS market survey, and the modal shift data in Nanjing, China. The life cycle assessment was administered to determine the carbon emission during the life cycle of DBS. In the case study of Nanjing, 38.6% of DBS trips are originally from motorised modes. And the carbon emission factor of DBS is found to be 22.53 g CO2/km. Based on the above findings, it takes about 842 days to strike a balance between the carbon emission in the life cycle and the emission reduction benefit. This research will significantly help transportation planners and decision-makers committed to the sustainable development of the DBS system.

•Virtual stations of dockless bike sharing are identified by trip data analysis.•All virtual stations are classified into four categories by time series clustering.•72% of virtual stations can achieve the self-balancing of bike amounts.•Bike-increasing stations are concentrated in the city center.•Bike-fluctuating stations are concentrated near metro lines.

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) stands as a burgeoning electric transportation carrier, holding substantial promise for the logistics sector. A reinforcement learning framework Centralized - S Proximal Policy Optimization (C-SPPO) based on centralized decision process and considering policy entropy (S) is proposed. The proposed framework aims to plan the best scheduling scheme with the objective of minimizing both the timeout of order requests and the flight impact of UAVs that may lead to conflicts. In this framework, the intents of matching act are generated through the observations of UAV agents, and the ultimate conflict-free matching results are output under the guidance of a centralized decision maker. Concurrently, a pre-activation operation is introduced to further enhance the cooperation among UAV agents. Simulation experiments based on real-world data from New York City are conducted. The results indicate that the proposed C-SPPO outperforms the baseline algorithms in the Average Delay Time (ADT), the Maximum Delay Time (MDT), the Order Delay Rate (ODR), the Average Flight Distance (AFD), and the Flight Impact Ratio (FIR). Furthermore, the framework demonstrates scalability to scenarios of different sizes without requiring additional training.

Dockless bike sharing (DBS), as an emerging bike sharing scheme, effectively promotes active travel and improves the mobility of users. Travel behavior analysis of DBS users is a key basis of service improvement, and the data sources include user surveys and trip records. User surveys are widely applied but have the drawback of perceptual errors. Thus, there is a compelling need for exploring travel behavior using automatically-collected trip records. This study examines DBS users' travel frequency and purpose with five semi-annual user surveys and trip record data in Nanjing, China. User surveys reflect user perception of travel behavior, while trip records can be used to calculate actual travel frequency and infer travel purpose. The results show that perceptual travel frequency based on user surveys has a central tendency, and actual travel frequency based on trip records follows a heavy-tailed distribution. Older people tend to underestimate their travel frequency, but other age groups tend to overestimate their frequency. In addition, a dockless bike sharing's travel purpose inferring (DBS-TPI) model is proposed to infer the travel purpose based on trip record data and points of interest data. The DBS-TPI model is reliable and transferable under different scenarios, which could complement user surveys. This study provides insights into improving data collection for better understanding of travel behaviors among DBS users.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) has triggered a worldwide outbreak of pandemic, and transportation services have played a key role in coronavirus transmission. Although not crowded in a confined space like a bus or a metro car, bike-sharing users are exposed to the bike surface and take the transmission risk. During the COVID-19 pandemic, how to meet user demand and avoid virus spreading has become an important issue for bike-sharing.