Free-flow Carsharing Systems in a Spatio-Temporal Urban Ecosystem: an Urban Informatics Approach

During the last years, sharing mobility is one of the emerging transport modes, but seldom its planning is entrusted to private operators and not seen as a major vector of urban mobility. The aim of this paper is to provide an extensive analysis of the relation between the utilization of carsharing vehicles and urban spatio-temporal patterns, focusing on the analysis of 4 weeks of free-flow carsharing data in the City of Milan. Since both temporal and spatial phenomena are influencing the carsharing demand, time-invariant factors (e.g., resident population density, etc.) and time-variant factors (e.g., public transport offer) were taken into consideration and analysed in relation to starting and ending point of rentals, and OD couples’ characteristics. All the statistical analyses are performed on the weekday’s and weekend’s average values for each hour of the day, resulting in a series of daily utilization patterns unveiling the relationship between site-specific characteristics in respect to carsharing demand