On the Use of City Bikes to Make the City Even Smarter

International audienceThese last years have witnessed the riseof the smart cities and several mechanisms to renderthe cities more sustainable and more energy-efficient.Among all different aspects is transportation and urbanbike development. Besides the growing enthusiast provokedby bicycles and the benefit for health they bring,there still exists some reluctance in using bikes becauseof safety, road state, weather, etc. To counter-balancethese feelings, there is a need to better understandbicycle users habits, path, road utilization rate in orderto improve the bicycle path quality. In this perspective,in this paper, we propose to deploy a set of mobilesensors on bicycles to gather this different data and toexploit them to make the bike easier and make peoplewant to ride bicycles more often. Such a network willalso be useful for several entities like city authoritiesfor road maintenance and deployment, doctors and environmentauthorities, etc. Based on such a framework,we propose a first basis model that help to dimensionthe network infrastructure and the kind of data to bereal time gathered from bikes. More specifically, wepresent a theoretical model that computes the quantityof data a bike will be able to send along a travel and thequantity of data a base station should be able to absorb.We have based our study on real data to provide firstnumerical results and be able to draw some preliminaryconclusions and open new research directions