City Lab Barcelona

Urban on-street bike parking might have been an afterthought in the past, but increasingly cities will need better data on who, when and how residents are using on-street bike parking facilities. Which neighbourhoods are at capacity? Which areas need more facilities? What is the temporal dynamics and diurnal-noctural fluctuations? Where are the conflicts between pedestrians and illegally parked bicycles? Where are spots occupied by private bike-share programs? What about scooters? Or abandoned bikes? And what about kid bikes? How present are they in the urban cycling mix? And on average, how long do bikes stay in the on-street spots? Are they for day use? night use? or long term use? In this post I present some preliminary data with research conducted with Sofie Dejaegher, Esteve Corbera and Victoria Ortega, on urban on-street bike parking in Barcelona, with data collected between February and July 2021. Our journal article will come out later, but here are a few illustrative figures ...

In September 2021 I began a new research position at the Institute for Environmental Science and Technology ( ICTA ) at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB). It has been a pleasure to meet new colleagues and get settled down in a beautiful eco-friendly building that is LEED Certified. I look forward to focusing my research agenda on Barcelona and this blog will be a platform for sharing some of the research ideas that are emerging, and become sort of the embryo for the new research team based at ICTA.  My new research group will be called  City Lab Barcelona and our mission will be the generation of new knowledge that accelerates the transition to sustainable urban planning and design . To call a research team a Laboratory or Lab has become quite fashionable recently, especially in the social sciences. I welcome this analogy because there is much that we social scientists can learn from those researchers that run physical labs - of course, adapting as appropriate. In ...