jyl

I've read some suggestions that Citibikes could turn to crowd sourcing for help in rebalancing. Various schemes have been floated, but the basic idea is offering inducements for people to ride Citibikes from stations where there are too many to stations where there are too few.

Anyone think this can work? Or would you see people gaming the system - e.g. riding bikes back and forth between stations?

Edit: My impression is that currently the response is to increase the system's rebalancing resources (more drivers/loaders, more vans, more bike trailers), increase the number of bikes (some held at times in central inventory). I imagine that if they throw enough drivers, vans and bikes at the high-demand points, they can mostly handle the problem, but at what cost?

Suppose I have a $100 annual membership and ride a Citibike twice a day, from Penn Station to midtown in the morning and from midtown to Penn Station in the afternoon, 5 days a week and 50 months a year. That is 500 trips, Citibikes gets $0.20 revenue per each trip. If the bike has to rebalanced every time, that seems pretty uneconomic for Citibikes. It has to cost $0.50 to $1.00, at least, to rebalance each bike - figure a two-man team moves 40 bikes per hour?

Or, figure it a different way. How many rebalancers does Citibikes employ? Reports say they are adding 35 more, not sure how many they had before. Suppose 60 rebalancers x 8 hours x 260 days (assume much less rebalancing needed on weekends). Plug in an hourly cost per person (include taxes, benefits, truck cost, etc). Okay, this is just a totally crude guess, but anyway the potential annual cost looks alarming.