Twice in one day! From Ken Ohrn:
There is a new name in the bike-share business — “Motivate” — who were Alta Bicycle Share.
With the company’s new management and more solid financial backing, perhaps at last the City of Vancouver will be able to get past the mandatory helmet law and get Motivated.
Are there any sponsors out there? Hello Lululemon, hello Telus, Goldcorp? Teck Resources? HSBC Bank Canada? Ledcor? MDA? Anyone?
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Bill Steele writes in Phys.org about recent work around the rebalancing of bike-share stations during the day, to ensure that both bikes and empty docks are available to customers. The work involves developing algorithms and data analysis tools to help the Citi Bike system operate as efficiently as possible
It’s an interesting look behind the scenes at the operational complexities and logistics of a bike-share system.
Citi Bike deploys 6,000 bikes throughout the city that are often taken on more than 10 trips each day. In the morning, commuters pick up a bike near home and drop it off near their job. Near home, supplies dwindle, while midtown stations fill up, sometimes leaving few places to dock. During the day, similar imbalances occur across town. The solution is to “rebalance,” using trucks to move bikes from crowded locations to empty ones. …
David Shmoys, the Laibe/Acheson Professor and Director of the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering, and graduate student Eoin O’Mahony have developed algorithms and data analysis tools to help rebalance the Citi Bike system as efficiently as possible. …
“We first needed to analyze massive quantities of data to determine usage patterns and determine how many bikes would be found at each station at key times during the day,” Shmoys said. “The next step is to figure out how many bikes should be at each station at key times, so riders would find bikes available as well as open docks to put them in at the end of a ride.”
Here’s another look at the situation.
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One wonders about dear old Soggyville’s system that will need to contend with a mandatory helmet law. The operator will need to cycle helmets through a cleaning and replenishment process, and also ensure that sufficient numbers of helmets are available at all stations. It’s a similar, but more complex problem. All this brings added cost to a system where ridership (and revenue) will likely be significantly lower than in cities without mandatory helmet laws.
Bike sharing, like wind mills, are a nice gimmick for green folks that believe it will relieve traffic congestion (or solve energy issues).
IT WILL FAIL .. especially with a bike helmet law in place, plus it will put out of business barely profitable bike rental shops near Stanley Park.
It is a waste of tax payer money.
Rather than installing a subway city or charging 400-1000% more for parking to reduce car use in cities, council toys with these cheap ideas that make them feel “green” and “reducing CO2 emissions”.
Click for many many links to bike share failures: https://www.google.ca/search?q=bike+share+failures&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&gws_rd=cr&ei=ATW3VPOEFMiBygTKvIGoCA
It’s not about financial success or supplanting vehicle/transit users – think of bikeshare more like Car2Go or a bike taxi….as a part of a public service. Bikeshare adds to the public good and gives people the freedom of one-way bike rides and increased transportation options.
Understood. One needs to look at price tags though, as every service provided costs money, and if heavily subsidized like these bike share gimmicks, one group is asked to fund life style choices of others. I would have no problem if these bike share services are self funded, but I do have a problem subsidizing them with my taxes.
So it’s OK to subsidize walking, driving and transit, but not cycling? Surely it depends on the payback and cycling offers a bigger benefit to cost ratio than any other mode of transportation. Also, cities which have introduced bike share systems have also seen bigger increases in overall cycling, thereby leveraging the investments in bike share.
The helmet law probably means higher costs (both higher fixed costs to install a station, and higher variable costs to continually wash and redistribute helmets), more complexity leading to less reliability, and lower revenues from less ridership (due to the annoyance). This means either higher fares (which could cause the system to implode from falling ridership) or more politically unsavory subsidies.
I usually don’t wear a helmet – it’s itchy, cumbersome, and I envision myself engaging in an act of heroic libertarian civil disobedience.
Would might happen is that the helmet requirements drive the system towards implosion, and in a desperate act to save the program from collapse, the law will be abandoned. I hope it doesn’t get that bad before the law is chucked, but I am pessimistic given the amount of political capital invested in the helmet law.
As far as the helmet law, the mayor needs to simply direct the police to not enforce the law (or deprioritize it), at a minimum for adults and/or for people riding bike share bikes.
The rebalancing problem is interesting and really can screw the success of these programs. But an interesting solution I saw in Berlin is that the DB bikes have a built in lock. So if your destination station is full then you can simply lock the bike beside it. It doesn’t solve the problem of empty stations but it makes the problem much easier. It does require a different bike design though than the predominant Bixi designed model seen in most North American systems.