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This article presents an analysis of the supply and demand of a FFBSS recently implemented in the city of Bologna, Italy. The main aspects treated in this paper are: analysis of bike availability; temporal analysis of FFBSS demand; calibration and validation of a novel model that predicts the number of daily trips per available bike. This model is based on a linear combination of several day attributes, including meteorological and day-type attributes. Moreover, an origin to destination analysis is generated showing the spatial distribution of FFBSS trips. The methods are applied to a scenario with almost a million GPS traces recorded between July and October 2018 by the FFBSS in Bologna. Findings could support FFBSS companies to better understand the fluctuation of both the transport demand and supply of this relatively recent transport mode, as to make more efficient decisions when distributing or relocating bicycles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main goal of this paper is to analyse recent trends in freight transport volumes as well as their relation to socio-economic and infrastructural variables, in the case of the following major European countries: France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom. This analysis refers to the period 2005-2016, so that years affected by the global economic crisis, which shows its peak in 2009, are taken into account. This research demonstrated that not all the countries under study show a strong relation between freight traffic and GDP as it could have been expected based on well consolidated experiences and studies. Moreover, other relations are investigated, with mixed results, between the freight traffic volumes and the extension of the rail and road networks as well as oil price data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]