Forum Discussion

Throcky's avatar
Throcky
Casual Commenter
4 years ago

4 point cap side effects

Over the past few months there have been too few bikes uptown and midtown, and far too many bikes in Brooklyn - specifically lower Park Slope, Kensington, and Red Hook. It seems to me that many of the places where bikes are lacking are on higher ground, and many of the places where there are too many are on lower ground. The non-Angel users of Citibikes are mostly riding downhill, and there is not enough balancing being done by Lyft.  The Bike Angel program used to use a more varied point structure that helped balance the bikes more, but now the points seem to have been limited to 4 points maximum.  There are simply not enough Bike Angels incentives to ride these heavy bikes uphill in enough numbers to combat the downhill trend.  

rebalancing
  • CarolTandava's avatar
    CarolTandava
    Steady Solver
    4 years ago

    Agreed. They are also used to be more variation between rewarded and unrewarded docs in an area creating more of an incentive to move bikes. Now we see full square miles of docks with only one kind of reward, so Angels only move bikes closest to the perimeter.

    This happens a lot near Flatbush Avenue. All the Park Slope docks are full and the North Slope docks are empty. So the bikes near Flatbush get moved, but the others don’t.