December 15, 2017

Are Private Free Float Systems the Death of Publicly Available Bike Share Data?

In my last blog post, I wrote about the new bike share systems that have taken over the city of Seattle. However, when writing this post, I left out one major detail, the data for the bike share companies is not publicly available like that of their predecessor. This issue has been brought back to the forefront of my mind because Nice Rides in Minneapolis is planning on replacing its system with a private free float system. What is interesting about this is that Nice Rides is already a relatively successful system, but wants the ability to expand to up to 10,000 bikes at lower costs. These private free float systems give them that ability. By doing this, they also claim it will enable the system to be more equitable.

Cities desire systems that are equitable and often permits are conditionally granted based off of equitable designs. To ensure equity both finalists for the new Minneapolis system (Limebike and Motivate International) have agreed to have equity strategies. However, I don’t see equity being a primary concern for their companies. As a private company, each of them is going to want to maximize their profits. This means that they are going to want to rebalance the bikes to places where they will have a higher turnover rate and thus generate more revenue. In Seattle you often see them rebalanced to areas that have these high turnover rates (eg: light rail stops, downtown, tourist areas). Unfortunately, these private companies do not publicly share their data, as most docked systems do, making it difficult to tell whether or not the cities’ equity conditions are actually being met.

From a research perspective, this worries me because a lot of the research I have done has been with this publicly available data, including two papers I will be presenting at the TRB Annual Meeting next month. Although this is just a couple systems that have transitioned to this model, if it proves successful more and more systems will transition. This will mean there will be less data available to research bike sharing. Understanding this points to the importance of creating rules that require these companies to provide publicly available data so that researchers can provide insights on how these systems can be successful and equitable. Currently Seattle, allows bike share companies to forego this data requirement by joining the UW Data Collaborative. In this case, the data collaborative does not provide the data to other people, not even students or faculty within the school…..(I’m not that bitter…..)

For this reason, I am skeptical that these equity plans will remain a priority unless the city strictly enforces it. From a research standpoint, there could be some interesting questions to be answered if the system actually does provide good coverage to low-income areas. Typically, these areas have lower usage but also have less coverage. If these systems provide sufficient coverage to these areas, researchers could begin to develop a better understanding of what it is that limits ridership in these areas and what it takes to increase demand. Research by Don MacKenzie and Ryan Hughes also shows the importance of system data for enabling assessments of equity in new mobility services.

Long term I believe that these free float companies are the bike sharing of the future and will help to encourage more people to adopt public and shared modes. Although I understand the privacy concerns that come with this sort of GPS data, I still believe that we must maintain some public availability. In the case of Seattle, data is heavily guarded and only certain researchers have access to it. Not only is this unfair to the other researchers, because some have a monopoly on the data, but the public loses the benefits that would come from more people studying it. The good thing is the cities have the leverage to force these companies to make the data available, we just have to convince the cities that it is important. In this case, it is more important that cities leverage the companies for data rather than token equity measures, because if a system that is inequitable doesn’t have public data, then people might not know it’s inequitable at all; however, if data is available then the companies would receive public pressure to be equitable.