The Growing Pains of Bike Sharing Systems

After the popular success, some bike sharing systems still suffer from growing pains due to uncertain availability of the service throughout the days and seasons (previously exposed in Barcelona and Paris). The issues have been highlighted in the media these past months such as the official request to perform an external audit of Bicing in Barcelona, and in C’est une impression ou on ne trouve plus de Vélib’ le matin? the list of complains related to Velib’ in Paris. There are several efforts in improving the systems by the providers (JCDecaux and ClearChannel), the local authorities, the users themseves (e.g. from their ideas and mashups) as well as other independent stakeholders in the forms of think tanks (e.g. Espace des Temps in Lyon or The Commons) and “mobility operators” (term inspired by Thierry Marcou) such as Telefonica R&D and their Bicing Usage Survey. Nevertheless it makes me wonder whether they really go beyond the traditional methods of urban and transportation planning. There might be new practices inspired from the worlds of interaction design, evidence-based urbanism and software engineering when it comes to envision and design hybrid urban systems mixing physical artifacts and digital information.

Why do I blog this: Doing some background research on the state of bike sharing systems, for an article (slightly outside the scope of my thesis) on mixed methods research to design future sustainable transport systems based public forms of private transport.