
Balancing Bike-Share Stations Has Become a Scientific Endeavor - wallflower
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2014/08/balancing-bike-share-stations-has-become-a-serious-scientific-endeavor/379188/
======
gst
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.

~~~
eridius
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.

~~~
xanderstrike
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
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
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.

------
jpfr
I recently published on the same topic. [1]

In many bike sharing systems (such as in London), there is a daily repeating
cycle, where too many people want to get to the city center in the morning and
back out in the early evening. You know that will happen. So countermeasures
can be taken early on.

[1] Dynamic Vehicle Redistribution and Online Price Incentives in Shared
Mobility Systems,
[http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumb...](http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6754195)

~~~
sliverstorm
Why is this a problem? If X people take bikes into the city center in the
morning, and then the same X people take bikes back out in the evening, that
sounds balanced to me.

~~~
skybrian
That only works if there are enough bikes for each bike to be used only once
during the morning or evening commute. If you need to reuse a bike multiple
times in one morning (say at 8am, 9am, and 10am) to serve everyone, it has to
somehow go where someone will use it.

------
robrenaud
Maybe the real solution is social rather than technical?

How many move around to different places for the sake of internet points?
Seemingly lots of them.
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_(game)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingress_\(game\))

Can we just convince them to balance our bike shares instead?

------
gevz
I wonder how this problem is solved by car2go. There are no stations to drop
the vehicle, and cars can not be transported in bulk. Would it help to get rid
of the stations for the bikes?

~~~
wuschel
In Germany, Call-a-bike (Deutsche Bahn) [1] operates exactly like this. Bikes
can be rented everywhere inside the city, and can be left on every junction
within a city. There are no drop-off/rental stations.

So far, I did not have any problems to find a bike when I needed it.

[1]
[http://www.bahn.de/p/view/service/fahrrad/call_a_bike.shtml](http://www.bahn.de/p/view/service/fahrrad/call_a_bike.shtml)

------
pkaye
How do these systems work if there are not enough stations to return your
bike?

