| 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. |