Bike sharing as a key smart city service: State of the art and future developments

Bike sharing has outgrown its first failures in the '60s and '70s and has become ubiquitous around the world. This rapid growth is strongly intertwined with the rise of Smart Cities: the use of connected bikes makes the service more practical for users, avoids thefts and provides a large amount of data for system planners. Over the past few years, research on bike sharing has bloomed, providing several innovative solutions to improve the service and to encourage citizens to use environmentally friendly modes of transportation, reducing both traffic and commuting times. In this work, we present the most promising developments towards a tighter integration between Smart City data and techniques and the operation and planning of bike-sharing systems, focusing on two model use-cases: New York City's CitiBike service, a large system with hundreds of stations, and Padova's GoodBike system, which has just 28 stations.