From Rev: Meet Pillar, Lyft’s New Dock

Hi Jess - I was going to write a separate post about the pillar docks but this seems like a good place to add it. I think there may be an issue/problem with Angel Points and pillar docks.

I know of a few stations that have only new pillar docks. These stations are always neutral despite being completely or mostly full. If that’s what the system determines, fine, but the other stations close by all will show pick-up points as those stations are completely or mostly full as well.

I wouldn’t have thought about this as a potential problem if not for an issue arose with a ride I recently took. I removed a bike from a traditional station which showed 6 pick-up points. While most docks at the station are the old style ones there is one pillar dock which had recently replaced a presumably broken old style dock. I took the bike from the pillar. When l docked the bike at another station, I did not receive credit for the pick-up points. I went back to the same station and took a bike from a traditional dock and received the pick-up points shown on the map as normal. (I repeated the process again and likewise received the points.)

I had screenshots and customer service credited me for the missing points on the first ride.

However, the issue remains that the pillar dock didn’t seem to register the pick-up points showing on the map. As more pillars appear around the city, there may be a lot of questions/issues about missing points or seemingly illogical situations of full/empty stations always being neutral.

Hi RickyDee! Thanks for bringing this up. It looks like you identified some real issues:

1. It looks like stations that consist of only Pillar docks are neutral when they shouldn't be. I filed a bug and someone in my team will address this
2. You also found a station where we installed a one off Pillar dock to test important things like solar power generation in real world situations. Because these one off docks are not part of the same station in our back-end, we had installed them with a hood on them to prevent people from using them, but it looks like some of those hoods disappeared somehow. We'll look into disabling them server side too, but for the time being you should avoid using those one or two Pillar docks in mixed stations for Bike Angels moves

On a side note: in retrospect I should have realized that it's odd that the Pillar station close to our office is always neutral, but I somehow wrote that off as luck or a result of the fact that I'm 45 minutes from the office and demand being neutral at the time I left my house)

Remco I thought it was strange to see a pillar without the hood in an old-style station but seeing a bike docked at it l thought it was ok to use. I won’t be taking them anymore unless/until the kinks are ironed out. Thanks for the attention!

Jess attached are the screenshots for the ride in question. It was on 11/12 at 2:39 pm. I rode from W22 St & 10th Ave to W25 St & 9th Ave. If you look in my ride history you’ll see the two subsequent rides between the same stations were properly credited as normal. Let me know if you need any other info.

Hey there, RickyDee, thanks for taking the time to send this feedback about your experience with Pillar. You're right that we'd want to be aware of any weirdness preventing points from creditng at stations that have Pillar docks and the older docks.

I'll call attention to this feedback internally to flag any potential unintended impact to Bike Angels as Pillar is being further implemented. It would be helpful to pinpoint this ride to share with the feedback so we can investigate more deeply. I'm looking at your recent support interactions—Do you recall the date and approximate time of the ride? I want to make sure I have the right one. 👼

RickyDee -  Was the dock at 22nd and 9th down?  Why would you go all the way back to Tenth Avenue to do the next trip?  Are you sure you removed both bikes from the same station?  This does not add up?  Maybe it was the station itself that was the problem.