Bikeshare systems, both docked and dockless, struggle with a perpetual problem of balancing their bikes. Although dedicated teams shuttle bikes around a system at almost any hour of the day, it’s never quite enough, and they need help from the customers that use those bikes to get around.
At our Transportation Techies‘ Bikeshare Hack Night IX, Collin Waldoch and Joshua Roberts from Motivate (the company that operates Capital Bikeshare in DC and Citi Bike in New York) shared their early evaluation of Bike Angels, Capital Bikeshare’s new program that incentivizes riders to move bikes among stations that most need more open or filled docks.
The Bike Angels program could be a model across the transportation ecosystem for helping people make better transportation choices.
Flow state
Waldoch and Roberts explained that full-time rebalancing employees remain at the core of the distribution network, but human behavior makes it impossible to perfectly position every bike.
For example, more people will ride bikes downhill than will return them to their positions at higher ground, which is one factor in what Waldoch called “neighborhood asymmetry,” where certain areas experience a net inward or outward flow of bikes. This, in addition to other influences such as weather, mean that a bikeshare system’s balancing efforts need small, real-time tweaks in order to optimize the experience for customers. Incremental tweaks like this must be performed faster than a balancing team can accomplish.
By providing constant – in 15-minute segments for Bike Angels – feedback on areas of need, customers can begin circulating bikes in such a way that they arrive in the right places at the right times more reliably than can happen with employees relocating equipment in bulk.
A screenshot of Citi Bike’s Bike Angels program
A Motivate-tional push
Motivate worked with customers to understand what would best prompt them to help with the rebalancing effort and developed a pyramid of compensation that identified three axes of incentivization: competition/collection (like PokemonGO), cash compensation (like “Bird Hunters”), and community mission (like Wikipedia editors). Bike Angels users seemed to fall in the middle of those three points.
According to Waldoch and Roberts, the vast majority of the impact comes from occasional Angels, but a few power users have shown that certain customers will continually hunt for bikes to balance, even after they have far surpassed their monthly rewards cap.
Team members working on Bike Angels have interviewed some of the most active Bike Angels from Capital Bikeshare and New York’s Citi Bike system. They found that there is a strong desire to contribute to the system and to make other riders’ days better. Waldoch especially remembered a few customers explaining that they have seen people check out a bike that they had just dropped at an empty station, and feeling pleased that they could make that individual’s day that much easier, and do so just in time.
What Motivate discovered was that those who signed up for the Bike Angels program were motivated more by giving back to the system than by financial rewards. Some power users also found encouragement in the game-like aspect of having a leaderboard of who collects the most points every month.
These were all customers predisposed to personally contributing to the system, but those psychological rewards were simply the nudge they needed to do it. Being able to address all three axes created a reliable group of Angels that have Waldoch and Roberts say have been a significant boon to the system’s rebalancing efforts.
Transportation demand management angels?
The success of Bike Angels and similar programs can be an informative model for influencing the behavior of a whole ecosystem of commuters. Metropolitan regions that hope to reduce driving alone, and that actually have alternatives to promote, can create similar programs that address the various motivations which ultimately get people to change their behavior.
Durham, North Carolina, represents one such area that is exploring this potential through Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayors’ Challenge by creating personalized commuter itineraries that track a number of motivational factors, such as reduced emissions and weight-loss potential.
Behavior change does not happen without a nudge by an entity like Motivate or a city government; people frequently know what they should do, but need the platform to enable it. In addition, even for altruistic actors, adding in rewards or a competitive stimulus such as a leaderboard combine to promote more consistent contributions to the systems.
With the right nudges, though, a community can better manage the space it has and how people use it. This will be an important tool in addressing the behavioral economics of transportation choices, such as resetting commuters’ perceptions of what is best for them, and for guiding them towards more rational choices that benefit themselves and society at the same time.
Photo by Sam Kittner for Mobility Lab