The encyclopedia · Strategy & Leadership · Operational decision · 2018
Bike Angels crowdsourced Citi Bike rebalancing and won the 2018 Wagner Prize
Cornell + Motivate optimized dock counts and paid riders to move bikes, matching truck rebalancing cheaply.
Motivate (Citi Bike) · Uber
The solution
Bike-share systems naturally drift: popular destinations fill up with bikes while origin stations empty out. Rebalancing by truck is expensive and polluting, and deciding how many docks each station deserves is itself a hard allocation problem.
Researchers from Cornell worked with Motivate, operator of the largest U.S. bike-share systems in New York, Chicago and San Francisco, to optimize the allocation of docks to stations, then created the Bike Angels incentive program to crowdsource rebalancing: riders earn rewards for returning bikes to stations that need them.
Both projects were fully implemented: Motivate moved hundreds of docks nationwide, and Bike Angels now aids rebalancing in San Francisco and New York, yielding improvement comparable to traditional truck rebalancing at far less financial and environmental cost. The work won the 2018 Daniel H. Wagner Prize.
Why it worked
- Analytics showed where docks were misallocated
- Rider incentives replaced expensive truck miles
- Crowdsourced rebalancing scaled to many cities
What can be applied
If your asset keeps ending up in the wrong place, don't only move it yourself; design incentives so the users' own behavior does the rebalancing.
Aftermath
Motivate's systems, later part of Lyft, kept using the dock-allocation work and the Bike Angels program; the results are documented in the paper 'Analytics and Bikes: Riding Tandem with Motivate to Improve Mobility'.
Sources
- Analytics and Bikes: Riding Tandem with Motivate to Improve Mobility
- Researcher's work to improve bike-shares recognized with INFORMS Daniel H. Wagner Prize
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