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While consuming a succulent chinese meal last night, I decided to do a little research into the company who produces the duck sauce packets. Hidden businesses like this are always interesting to me, even if I find the quality of soy sauce in these packets to be so far below par I can't stand to use them. The NY Times had a great little article from 1994 on the same corporation. Interesting to see single serve packaging as a somewhat recent innovation instead of so ubiquitous as to be background noise.
As any article would, the footer was packed with items to read next, which led to an expose on the hustlers "gamifying" the load balancing algorithms for Citi bikes. That's a bit too polite of a way to put it. The TL;DR: is that some folks have figured out the precise algorithm used to pay volunteers, including timing intervals and calculations behind the scenes. Volunteers of a high status get unlimited bike unlocks, and have formed gangs that empty whole racks, move them a trivial distance, then move them back, to pull down up to $6,000 a month.
A small group of people purposefully wiping out whole bike racks for commuters, all day every day for their gain is about what you'd expect in 2024. I respect the reverse-engineering and black-hattery of it in many ways, but it's not what the system needs or what the algo was built for.
The comment section is perhaps even more enlightening than the article. The "journalist" spent quite a bit of time running interference for the gang, with the classic playbook of repeating how much money Lyft makes and bitching about the downsides of the gig economy. To Lyft's credit, they basically said this is a rounding error and they don't care, but I think that has more to do with the pragmatism of any reasonable algorithm being exploitable in some way. How do you stop this without punishing poorly paid volunteers who are already a huge step up over contractors? Not easily, and solving problems for the 1% of troublemakers is often a road to hell.
I’ve long wondered why people are habitually renting e-bikes. They’re much cheaper and easier to store than cars, so I’d point to the usual reasons given as not applying.
Like, it might be trendy social contagion, but you’d think people would notice that just buying the things is the better deal.
They're also much easier to steal than cars [citation needed], so I could see that driving behavior in some cities. Being able to just drop it off at a dock rather than making sure you're locking it in a good, visible location could be worth a few bucks to people. For small apartments, storage could become relevant as well - small studios aren't exactly rare and storing a bulky e-bike is kind of clunky.
But e-bikes aren’t much bigger than a regular bike, and most people don’t rent those?
You have a point about theft, but I don’t know that it’s a huge one in a world where existing responses to theft are already priced into major purchases with things like insurance.
These folks do have the answer. The cycle in every American city has been:
As a cyclist I can say that the risk of thievery is high enough there's no way for me to justify ever leaving my nice, light bike out of my sight. I'd rather outsource the risk to someone else, and they're great mobility enablers for tourists who misjudge the relative risk of public transport vs being on their own two wheels.
To be hard to steal and stand up to abuse at all, they're also heavy and slow. My 20 year old boat anchor of a low-end hardtail mountain bike is far nicer to ride than a Citibike.
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