On the use of city bikes to make the city even smarter

These last years have witnessed the rise of the smart cities and several mechanisms to render the cities more sustainable and more energy-efficient. Among all different aspects is transportation and urban bike development. Besides the growing enthusiast provoked by bicycles and the benefit for health they bring, there still exists some reluctance in using bikes because of safety, road state, weather, etc. To counter-balance these feelings, there is a need to better understand bicycle users habits, path, road utilization rate in order to improve the bicycle path quality. In this perspective, in this paper, we propose to deploy a set of mobile sensors on bicycles to gather this different data and to exploit them to make the bike easier and make people want to ride bicycles more often. Such a network will also be useful for several entities like city authorities for road maintenance and deployment, doctors and environment authorities, etc. Based on such a framework, we propose a first basis model that help to dimension the network infrastructure and the kind of data to be real time gathered from bikes. More specifically, we present a theoretical model that computes the quantity of data a bike will be able to send along a travel and the quantity of data a base station should be able to absorb. We have based our study on real data to provide first numerical results and be able to draw some preliminary conclusions and open new research directions.