Abstract

eer-reviewed Limerick was designated as Ireland’s National Smarter Travel demonstration area in 2012. Limerick Smarter Travel, which aims to promote sustainable travel in the City and suburbs, is a partnership between the Limerick Councils and the University of Limerick (UL). Within UL, final-year projects and other research is on-going in the smarter travel subject area. This paper is based on Limerick City’s Bike Sharing Scheme and a final-year project thesis which is a study of the feasibility of a stand-alone bike sharing scheme in the suburb of Castletroy adjacent to the University of Limerick. This paper also focused on discovering if it would be feasible to merge a Castletroy scheme with the existing Limerick city scheme or extend the existing city scheme to the Castletroy area. The paper details the use of a smartphone application to collect rich trip and mode share data and proposes this methodology as a significant improvement on current feasibility study methods for bike sharing scheme feasibility studies. The smartphone application is capable of collecting numerous persons travel data for the entire period of the day. Data such as distance travelled, mode of travel, time taken to travel and trip destination and origin are all collected within the application. From this data, heat maps were produced for each of the survey participants. An example of a heat map for one candidate can be seen in Figure 3.6. In these heat maps, dark purple lines highlight routes of low activity, where bright orange lines highlight routes of high activity for that user for the specified study period. A number of precedent studies were also investigated as well as generating, collecting, analysing and investigating a number of quantitative datasets. The quantitative datasets explored include: travel survey results for University of Limerick students and staff; Places of Work – Census of Anonymised Records data for Castletroy residents; secondary data gathered through an online survey and primary data gathered using the implementation of the GPS smartphone application to monitor the travel patterns of eighteen candidates. Recommendations for further research are also outlined in the paper.