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There was an article fairly recently on HN about how bike sharing is failing in San Francisco because it's so hilly. All the bikes would start at the top of hil
by SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
There was an article fairly recently on HN about how bike sharing is failing in San Francisco because it's so hilly. All the bikes would start at the top of hills and end up at the bottom and there was no system in place to relocate them back to the top.
- neves 9y agoIn the somewhat hilly Madrid, the system is of electric bikes. In Paris, if you leave the bike in Montmartre (high hill) they give more time in your hide.
- w-m 9y ago> In Paris, if you leave the bike in Montmartre (high hill) they give more time in your hide. This incentive seems to have little to no effect. Bike stations on top of the Paris hills (Montmartre, Belleville, Pantheon, ..) are almost always completely empty. It's not a huge issue in Paris as the city is mostly flat and you can walk down the hills within 5 minutes usually, finding a bike. The same system would fail miserably in a in a predominantly hilly city such as SF.
- Pxtl 9y agoSeems like a pricing issue. Tag the stations by elevation and make a price hike for trips that start at a high station and end at a low one, and vice versa. Does SF not have an organization manually rebalancing teh stations? Here in Hamilton you see pickups with trailers full of rental-bikes being redistributed.
- tonyedgecombe 9y agoThey could even offer negative pricing for bikes that are out of place.
- dredmorbius 9y agoHaul-back bonuses have been used in other domains for decades. Moving vans. Railway cars
- cylinder 9y agoAirport luggage carts
- xvedejas 9y agoThey do have people manually re-balancing the stations (I've seen them loading up a trailer with dozens of bikes around 2nd and Brannan). How often they do the re-balancing right now, however, that I don't know.