How are they going to deal with the fact that demand is not geographically distributed/balanced?
E.g. everyone wants to ride towards downtown in the morning, so there are no bikes left elsewhere, and there isn't enough space downtown to hold all the bikes. And only 2/3 of the morning people want to ride back in the evening, because they're doing other things in the evening.
IIRC, some European cities have whole trucks that carry bikes between neighborhoods throughout the day to solve this problem. But that only works if you have big concentrated bike-parking stations. You can't do this if bikes are parked all over the place on the street.
It would be really interesting if this service would pay you to ride bikes in the opposite direction of demand. But I can't imagine that would be economical. There just aren't enough people to bike from downtown to the suburbs in the morning, plus you're going to have to pay for them all to get back downtown afterwards!
Current bike share programs do require redistribution of bicycles, often as often as twice a day. In large city operations viaCycle would likely be subject to this as well, but that leaves operation costs nominal.
On university campuses we have seen the traffic to be much more free flowing, as students do not follow standard commute patterns. During standard maintenance bicycles can be moved around as needed.
We have discussed the possibility of incentivizing riders to help redistribute bicycles, although the effectiveness of this has yet to be proven.
>We have discussed the possibility of incentivizing riders to help redistribute bicycles, although the effectiveness of this has yet to be proven.
This is almost certainly because no-one has the data or analytics yet. Seems like a very interesting problem algorithmically.
Even small incentives can have dramatic effects – look at the number of under-employed who recycle aluminum cans for 5-10¢/pop. It's by far the most cost-effective way to increase the rate of recycling. There are certainly quite a number of people willing to move bicycles a couple miles for $1-2. I know I'm beating the HN dead horse here, but markets do tend to be efficient at allocating resources when the basic costs are set correctly.
With your mobile app, you have the advantage that you know not only where a bike was picked up, but how far the customer had to travel to reach it. With so much data at your disposal, you should be able to get a pretty good predictive handle on the ebb and flow of demand in the system.
It'll be cool when I can subscribe to a higher tier to have my demand weighted more heavily. ;)
We couldn't agree more! One of the things we're very excited about is the amount of data viaCycle's system can collect and organize. And because we're not tied to permanent infrastructure we can be flexible; adjusting to usage on demand, etc. Some of it may work, some of it may not, but we're looking forward to pushing the traditionally slow-moving transit world into the future.
E.g. everyone wants to ride towards downtown in the morning, so there are no bikes left elsewhere, and there isn't enough space downtown to hold all the bikes. And only 2/3 of the morning people want to ride back in the evening, because they're doing other things in the evening.
IIRC, some European cities have whole trucks that carry bikes between neighborhoods throughout the day to solve this problem. But that only works if you have big concentrated bike-parking stations. You can't do this if bikes are parked all over the place on the street.
It would be really interesting if this service would pay you to ride bikes in the opposite direction of demand. But I can't imagine that would be economical. There just aren't enough people to bike from downtown to the suburbs in the morning, plus you're going to have to pay for them all to get back downtown afterwards!