I just finished my first presentation of the 2013 IGU Regional Conference in Kyoto. In this presentation, co-authored by my academic advisor Prof. Yuji Murayama from the Division for Spatial Information Science at the University of Tsukuba, I talked about some very early findings of one of our most recent research projects analyzing the use of bicycles in the Tokyo Metropolitan Area. We are especially interested if and how the use of bicycles is integrated in routine commuting activities. We are doing this by analyzing a large-scale database of persontrip information.

The session was visited by an audience of roughly 15-20 people and sparked some interesting questions and discussions. Due to the time constraints (15 minutes presentation + 5 minutes Q&A) I wasn’t able to show everything we found so far, or to talk about the data in greater detail, but here are the slides I used:

I’m planning to publish an extended slide deck here soon, including some of the slides I had to remove from my original ~30 minute long version of the presentation. Furthermore, we’re definitely continuing to work on this project – as I said, we’re only getting started. Some of the remarks in today’s session actually sparked some interesting questions we are planning to touch on in the near future of this project, including the situation of bicycle racks at train stations and generally bicycle parking opportunities (where we’re currently looking for useful data), and a deeper look into the connections between bicycle use and urban structural function (which I only spoke about very briefly today in the end of my presentation).

So, if you’re interested in this topic, please stay tuned and keep an eye open for updates here. Also, if you’re interested in getting your hands dirty with the data we used in this analysis, you can do so here (in a limited way): http://bit.ly/persontrips