Seeing non-CaBi dockless bikes using CaBi docks (seen at Roosevelt Island), Thoughts
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Yesterday evening, Roosevelt Island Capital Bikeshare station looked like this:
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If the resolution of these pictures doesn’t work for you, I’ll explain what you’re seeing:
Dockless non-CaBi (JUMP/Lime) bikes parked in CaBi docks.
This, friends, is what the economists would call a freerider problem.
The dockless companies pay none of the infrastructure but often still get benefits from the anchoring presence of the stations. I mean, generally speaking the most common place you’ll find dockless e-bikes is at or around CaBi stations. This also applies to electric scooters. In this case at Roosevelt Island last night, it’s even more extreme because they’re actually using CaBi parking slots outright and no doubt deceiving some people.
(The non-CaBi bikes/scooters more often than not ending up at or near CaBi stations proves, to me, that stations are the key part of bikeshare/CaBi and its success. Offering predictability and for some people some psychological safety [“it’s okay for me to be doing this, a station is here”] and anchoring the system. And in principle a person with a key could use the CaBi system completely without a phone, or with a dead phone, if he simply knows where origin and destination stations are, and that is largely what the system used to be before they got around to introducing the first app in, I think, 2016 and is still how many use the system, I think.)
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Coming from the south, Saturday evening, approaching the plaza area around the footbridge to Roosevelt Island, I saw two boys about age 10 or 11 riding (not very well, wobbling) on two other JUMP bikes. (Not sure how they got them because is in theory there is an age limit.) Slowing down and passing them, I came up to the bikeshare station and could only laugh: Four more of these dockless JUMP bikes, the same as the two boys were on, were ‘docked’ in CaBi docks. This is the boldest case of the “dockless bike freeriding” I’ve seen and made sure to get a picture.
I’ve seen rows of e-scooters in front of stations before, and even dockless e-bikes sitting in front of stations, but I don’t recall ever seeing JUMP bikes actually ‘docked’ in CaBi stations like this. You’ll notice there is also a blue “Revel” moped in the back, also parked at the CaBi station for much the same reason. In theory, AFAIK, they can be parked anywhere, but whoever did it still ended up at the bikeshare station.
Since the most likely people to be using this particular station are ‘tourists’/visitors, they often won’t know anything’s unusual about this and will just take the dockless bikes, scanning them with phones, paying into Uber (or whoever now owns/runs these other JUMP bikes) instead of Capital Bikeshare who paid for and maintains the station.
(I can only wonder who ‘did’ it. As I think about it, it’s possible some well-meaning person saw a pile of dockless e-bikes near the Roosevelt Island bikeshare station, a common-enough sight, and thought he or she was doing a good deed by properly putting them in the docks.)
There are thirteen bikeshare docks at this station; the map was showing five bikes available and eight parking slots available, but in fact three to five JUMP bikes were occupying half of those available slots (three are visible in my picture plus possibly the two being used by the boys aforementioned).
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Roosevelt Island station should ideally IMHO really should be something like doubled from its current thirteen slots to twenty-five slots to meet tourist/visitor demand. I have a feeling this is one of the stations where there is a surprising number of excess demand over supply (lost potential trips), but concentrated very much to tourist peaks rather than daily users.
The station generally goes full/empty on good-weather weekends/holidays, and is far enough both in walked-distance and psychologically from any other station that few or no casual tourist-type visitors are going to trek up to Rosslyn just to get a bike.
Also anecdotally, on the good-weather days of April 2021 so far, on the times I’ve passed by the place, I’ve noticed a surprisingly big surge in Roosevelt-Island-goers. I presume these are people finally fed up of lockdowns etc and trying to make up for lost time. They’ve been parked all over the grass and all. The Capital Bikeshare station has been well used but often one can find more non-CaBi bikes and scooters than CaBi bikes, though that is a general problem throughout the system (to the extent it is a problem, though I don’t imagine many would argue that JUMP ‘stealing’ CaBi slots is not a problem!).
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