5 ms·

Most of the current systems appear to use manual rebalancing - if bikes aren't evenly distributed someone from the company operation the bike share program manu

by gst 12y ago

Most of the current systems appear to use manual rebalancing - if bikes aren't evenly distributed someone from the company operation the bike share program manually distributes bikes from one station to another station. I wonder how well an "economic" approach to this problem would work: Dynamically price the cost of a bike based on the station where the bike is taken and on the station where the bike is returned too. Then, if you want to distribute bikes from one station to another station you could assign a negative price for these routes, and thereby increase the traffic in that opposite direction. Assuming that the traffic behavior is relatively stable you don't even need dynamic pricing, but instead might be able to announce the pricing for a particular route weeks in advance.

jpfr 12y ago
See the paper linked in the post below. It deals with exactly that 'economic approach' in addition to traditional repositioning with trucks. But with positive customer incentives instead of added costs. There's a freely accessible preprint on arxiv under the same title if you cannot cross the paywall. By the way, incentives do not need to be monetary. In Paris, they give people free minutes for driving bikes to stations that are uphill...
zheshishei 12y ago
I came here to point out this exact same thing. Why use vans and trucks to re-balance stations when you can have people re-balance them? Not only can you can have dynamic pricing based upon stations and times, imagine having a feature where you can "call" for a bike at an empty station. There can be an app that notifies people near other close non-empty stations to ride a bike over for you. Or, you could even display it on the screen of the kiosk. How would you get people to ride these bikes for re-balancing or on demand? Offer something like a rewards plan (re-balance a bike X number of times and receive a discount on your next bike rental) or pay them in micro-payments (Think Tom Hanks returning luggage trolleys in The Terminal). How could you ensure that people riding bikes on demand don't take advantage of the process to just get a free ride to wherever? First, make sure that the bike being taken out is checked into the station it's being delivered to. Second, impose some sort of time limit in which that needs to be done. Base the time limit on an acceptable pace and take into account the distance between the stations (with a time buffer). If it exceeds that limit, it becomes a regular rental and the deliverer is charged regularly. Also, it then becomes possible to add bonus incentives for getting the bike to the station faster. One particular bonus of this system is that it can leverage a city's homeless population as a workforce. (If you disagree due to cleanliness issues, I'm sorry to tell you that the homeless already use citibikes as cycling machines). Of course, there would be a need to hedge against the possibility they may just take out a bike and never return it, since they don't really have any sort of credit. One possibility would be to sponsor a homeless person by covering the cost of a bike and then having them operate on a "one strike" policy.
eridius 12y ago
The problem is people don't pick their routes based on cost, they pick their routes based on where they're trying to go to.
- Fishkins 12y ago
  Exactly. If this were implemented, it would affect me one of two ways* 1) The cost variation would be small enough that I'd ignore it. 2) The cost would sometimes be high enough to dissuade me from taking a bike where I wanted to go, in which case I would quit the program completely. I don't want to have to change my travel plans at the last minute. Even if the extra cost were non-trivial but acceptable, the mental overhead of having to decide whether it's worth it would make the program much less appealing. * If I were actually participating in a bike share program. Currently I own my own bike, but I could see using a bike share program in the future.
- xanderstrike 12y ago
  I think what he means by "negative cost" is that you actually pay people (in credit), to take the bike to the desired station.
  - eridius 12y ago
    Yes that's what I understood as well, although that's just one component of "dynamically price". And even that isn't really going to work. That's equivalent to just paying someone outright to rebalance bikes, except it's ad-hoc, only moves one bike at a time, and significantly complicates the process.
    - SilasX 12y ago
      I agree that making money through riding a bike from a low to high demand station would be an edge case, but I don't see how it adds significant complication. You just list what the price would be at different stations if they return the bike there, with some being refunds.
  - Scoundreller 12y ago
Terretta 12y ago
In Paris, the stations offer you an economic incentive. Unlike in Manhattan which is comparatively flat, riders in Paris enjoy coasting down from Sacré-Cœur and not so much peddling back up again. So vélib encourages you to ride uphill: > Return your bike to one of 100 stations perched over 60 meters above the rest of the city, and 15 minutes of free riding is added to your account. Riding uphill is now a power-up. The free minutes are a bonafide reward, too, saving money on destinations that are often outside of the free 30-minute radius. More bikes make it back up the hill. Since the program was launched in June, over nine years of bonus minutes have been awarded. -- http://globalmoxie.com/blog/velib-bonus~print.shtml http://globalmoxie.com/blog/velib-bonus~print.shtml
lxmorj 12y ago
In Chicago the Divvy bike redistribution is horrible. It's not even a hard problem. Need to move bikes into the Loop at 5PM? Give people a free day pass in the future for moving a bike to a high-demand area.

by gst 12y ago

jpfr 12y ago

See the paper linked in the post below. It deals with exactly that 'economic approach' in addition to traditional repositioning with trucks. But with positive customer incentives instead of added costs. There's a freely accessible preprint on arxiv under the same title if you cannot cross the paywall. By the way, incentives do not need to be monetary. In Paris, they give people free minutes for driving bikes to stations that are uphill...

zheshishei 12y ago

I came here to point out this exact same thing. Why use vans and trucks to re-balance stations when you can have people re-balance them? Not only can you can have dynamic pricing based upon stations and times, imagine having a feature where you can "call" for a bike at an empty station. There can be an app that notifies people near other close non-empty stations to ride a bike over for you. Or, you could even display it on the screen of the kiosk. How would you get people to ride these bikes for re-balancing or on demand? Offer something like a rewards plan (re-balance a bike X number of times and receive a discount on your next bike rental) or pay them in micro-payments (Think Tom Hanks returning luggage trolleys in The Terminal). How could you ensure that people riding bikes on demand don't take advantage of the process to just get a free ride to wherever? First, make sure that the bike being taken out is checked into the station it's being delivered to. Second, impose some sort of time limit in which that needs to be done. Base the time limit on an acceptable pace and take into account the distance between the stations (with a time buffer). If it exceeds that limit, it becomes a regular rental and the deliverer is charged regularly. Also, it then becomes possible to add bonus incentives for getting the bike to the station faster. One particular bonus of this system is that it can leverage a city's homeless population as a workforce. (If you disagree due to cleanliness issues, I'm sorry to tell you that the homeless already use citibikes as cycling machines). Of course, there would be a need to hedge against the possibility they may just take out a bike and never return it, since they don't really have any sort of credit. One possibility would be to sponsor a homeless person by covering the cost of a bike and then having them operate on a "one strike" policy.

eridius 12y ago

The problem is people don't pick their routes based on cost, they pick their routes based on where they're trying to go to.

Fishkins 12y ago
Exactly. If this were implemented, it would affect me one of two ways* 1) The cost variation would be small enough that I'd ignore it. 2) The cost would sometimes be high enough to dissuade me from taking a bike where I wanted to go, in which case I would quit the program completely. I don't want to have to change my travel plans at the last minute. Even if the extra cost were non-trivial but acceptable, the mental overhead of having to decide whether it's worth it would make the program much less appealing. * If I were actually participating in a bike share program. Currently I own my own bike, but I could see using a bike share program in the future.
xanderstrike 12y ago
I think what he means by "negative cost" is that you actually pay people (in credit), to take the bike to the desired station.
- eridius 12y ago
  Yes that's what I understood as well, although that's just one component of "dynamically price". And even that isn't really going to work. That's equivalent to just paying someone outright to rebalance bikes, except it's ad-hoc, only moves one bike at a time, and significantly complicates the process.
  - SilasX 12y ago
    I agree that making money through riding a bike from a low to high demand station would be an edge case, but I don't see how it adds significant complication. You just list what the price would be at different stations if they return the bike there, with some being refunds.
- Scoundreller 12y ago

Terretta 12y ago

In Paris, the stations offer you an economic incentive. Unlike in Manhattan which is comparatively flat, riders in Paris enjoy coasting down from Sacré-Cœur and not so much peddling back up again. So vélib encourages you to ride uphill: > Return your bike to one of 100 stations perched over 60 meters above the rest of the city, and 15 minutes of free riding is added to your account. Riding uphill is now a power-up. The free minutes are a bonafide reward, too, saving money on destinations that are often outside of the free 30-minute radius. More bikes make it back up the hill. Since the program was launched in June, over nine years of bonus minutes have been awarded. -- http://globalmoxie.com/blog/velib-bonus~print.shtml http://globalmoxie.com/blog/velib-bonus~print.shtml

lxmorj 12y ago

In Chicago the Divvy bike redistribution is horrible. It's not even a hard problem. Need to move bikes into the Loop at 5PM? Give people a free day pass in the future for moving a bike to a high-demand area.