Designing a User Participation-Based Bike Rebalancing Service

Abstract

The Bicycle-sharing System (BSS) has been globally adopted as a sustainable transportation system that helps improve air pollution, public health and traffic congestion. The increased usage of BSSs requires an increased number of rebalancing trucks to distribute bikes throughout the city. Operating rebalancing trucks is an expensive venture that requires intensive manpower that is dependent on traffic congestion. In this background, a user participation-based rebalancing service was introduced to solve the problem, but it was difficult to test the impact of the service and the estimated cost in the city. Thus, this research proposes a simulation system that tests user participation-based rebalancing services with different user parameters such as the amount of incentives, the user participation rate and extra walking distances. We conducted an incentive survey on actual BSS users to determine the accurate values of these parameters. We also identified that, among the three parameters, extra walking distance is the most influential element on which to improve the rebalance imbalance metric. We found that the incentive coefficient is an important variable in determining the estimated cost of the service. Thus, any city can utilize the proposed system to design a user participation-based rebalancing service that is suitable for their city.

How Does Dockless Bike-Sharing System Behave by Incentivizing Users to Participate in Rebalancing?

“…While the average cycling speed was calculated based on trip data. In addition, the threshold of 500m that was identified as the incentivizing distance for most users to participate in bike rebalancing through experiment by Ban and Hyun [34] was determined as the maximum acceptable walking distance in our model.…”

Shifting to Shared Wheels: Factors Affecting Dockless Bike-Sharing Choice for Short and Long Trips

“…In this context, Mátrai and Tóth [8] reviewed the already existing definitions of the bike-sharing concept, all of which include some of its core characteristics: bike rental schemes, shared mobility, short-term access, point-to-point urban trips. The anticipated benefits and positive effects of bike-sharing include, traffic congestion alleviation, reduced fuel consumption, emissions reduction and air quality improvement, road safety improvement, physical activity increase and public health improvement, accessibility and multi-modality enhancement, reduced individual mobility costs and quality of urban life, to name a few [9][10][11][12][13]. Considering its expected contribution to a set of key objectives, bike-sharing is broadly believed to be a significant component of sustainable urban mobility [1,5,8,14].…”

Bike‐sharing systems with a dual selection mechanism and a dynamic double‐threshold repositioning policy

“…The proof of Equations (20) to (22) are given in Appendix A. Based on Equations (20) to (22), we write…”