The Impact of Bike-Sharing Ridership on Air Quality: A Scalable Data Science Framework

This research explores the relationship between daily air quality indicator (AQI) values and the daily intensity of bike-share ridership in New York City. The authors designed and deployed a distributed data science framework on which to process and run Elastic Net, Random Forest Regression, and Gradient Boosted Regression Trees. Nine gigabytes of CitiBike ridership data, along with 1 gigabyte of air quality indicator (AQI) data were employed. All machine learning algorithms identified bike-share ridership intensity as either the most important or the second most important feature in predicting future daily AQIs. The authors also empirically demonstrated that although a distributed platform was necessary to ingest and pre-process the raw 10 gigabytes of data, the actual execution time of all three machine learning algorithms on cleaned, joined, and aggregated data was far faster on a local, commodity computer than on its distributed counterpart.