Toronto Bike Share

[Northern Light]

New York has a rewards system for helping rebalance stations. Seems like it could be a good for Toronto but needs to be implemented properly, as unfortunately it can be abused by artificially creating the problem of a bunch of fully empty and completely full stations by moving bikes around, then solving that artificial problem and getting paid for that :

https://archive.is/ItHDf

I saw that piece.

I think it tells a useful tale, the basic idea is good, but you need to cap the amount someone can earn within a set period, and you need to limit the number of identical movements by the same cyclist in a 3-hour window.

At the end, you really need sufficient staffing, with 'paid' volunteers being the proverbial cherry on the Sundae that allow for that much better service.

 

[afransen]

I saw that piece.

I think it tells a useful tale, the basic idea is good, but you need to cap the amount someone can earn within a set period, and you need to limit the number of identical movements by the same cyclist in a 3-hour window.

At the end, you really need sufficient staffing, with 'paid' volunteers being the proverbial cherry on the Sundae that allow for that much better service.

Easy to mitigate I think.

Some potential measures:

• Cap payouts per user
• Don't offer payouts (rewards can be credit toward ebike ride minutes or discount on membership).
• Don't offer 3x rewards for moving multiple bikes in a day
• Don't allow more than 1 compensated repositioning trip in a certain time period (several hours)

Whenever you design any kind of scheme, you need to think about how users will break it. In this case, the intent is to reward incidental repositioning, not to make repositioning bikes a full-time gig.

 

[generalcanada]

From reddit: top stations in May and June only