BikeIt

Project Proposal

Introduction

Our Team name is Bike It!.

As technology is getting more sophisticated and easily accessible, environmental concerns are also being brought up more frequently. Bike-share technology is made available to individuals who want to rent bicycles on a short-term basis by just using their transportation card or application on their phone. Metro Bike Share, a partnership between Metro and the City of Los Angeles, aims to provide a fast, easy, and fun way to ride bikes.

Our goal is to examine the trends of bike-share usage and look for solutions to enhance the program.

Team Members

Yin Ue “Tianna” Chan

Yin Ue “Tianna” Chan (she/her/hers) is a senior pursuing a B.S. in Math/Econ with a minor in Digital Humanities. She is always looking for opportunities to improve her skills. After graduation, she hopes to leverage her analytical, critical thinking, and problem-solving skills in the business world and build a better community.

Irvin Ramirez

Irvin Ramirez (he/him/his) is a senior pursuing a B.A. in Sociology. He is a student who is interested in GIS and Urban Planning and hopes to improve his skills with web mapping through this course. After graduation, he plans on working on enhancing his skills in web mapping and development before applying to graduate school.

Leonela Aguilar

Leonela Aguilar(she/her/hers) is a fourth-year transfer student majoring in Sociology and minoring in Digital Humanities. She is currently interested in developing web-building skills and expanding her tech skills. Post-grad, she plans on immersing herself in the tech industry where she also hopes to represent more Latina women in the field.

Overview

The research inquiry focuses on the trends of bike-share usage in Los Angeles from 2021 April to 2022 March.

This is a matter of importance to the metro as it can help them understand how their bike-share program is performing, and uncover trends that help answer questions such as where should they implement more stations, which type of passholder/ bike type is popular, where they should invest more in, what time of the year/ month/ week is bike-sharing more popular, and even to what extent did metro contribute to reducing emissions, health benefits and more.

This is also important to current bike-share users, as the analysis can potentially help better plan their bike trip by having a holistic view of the locations of the stations with their popularity throughout time, and also where bike lanes are available.

To others, it is important to understand the bike-sharing situation in Los Angeles, to know the benefits of bike-sharing, and also to persuade them to change their commute!

Potential Research Questions:

How efficient was the program contribute to the benefit of the community?
What are the ways Metro can do to increase trip duration, pass sales, and improve the program in general?
How popular is the Metro bike sharing program and which areas ?
How can Metro improve the ride sharing services in neighborhoods with the least bike friendly roads ?

Methodology

We decided to choose web mapping as a methodology of inquiry because the various land uses in different regions of Los Angeles can tell a different story in regards to bike-share usage. Furthermore, we plan to also include visualization charts to uncover other trends as supplemental information.

Workflow

Structure: We will have weekly zoom meetings to collaborate and brainstorm ideas for the project. Having constant communication via Slack and keeping each other accountable for the work to be done.

Milestone	Steps/ Phases of the Project
Week 2	Draft project proposal
Week 3	Finalize project proposal, start data collection and cleaning
Week 4	Data collection Website and map design
Week 5	Data analysis Website and map design
Week 6	Midterm presentation Draft narratives
Week 7	Continue working on narratives Improving UX/UI design on websites
Week 8	Continue working on narratives Improving UX/UI design on websites
Week 9	Improving UX/UI design on websites
Week 10	Finalize our project
Finals Week	Presentation

Technical Scope

We would like to design our web pages using css and writing them in HTML, which we can share and edit the codes using Google Docs. We are also collaborating on Github, so we can push, pull, and sync our collaborative work via Visual Studio Code. Moreover, we will include Javascript for interactive elements such as an interactive web through Leaflet. We will also use relevant data cleaning and visualization tools such as Excel and Tableau to organize our sources and create necessary visualizations.