Teamwork and technology keep bike share program moving

At the Healthy Ride office in Lawrenceville, a map on a computer screen displays a color-specked map of Pittsburgh. The colors show Field Service Coordinator Kieran Moyle the status of all 50 stations in the city’s new bike share system: yellow means that some bikes at a station are due to be inspected, while red indicates that a bike has been flagged for repair. Green means that all bikes are in good condition. In a perfect system, Kieran explains, bikes would be checked after each ride; Healthy Ride staff aim to have their hands on them every few weeks.

For customers, renting a share bike is a simple process: a kiosk, a smartphone app, a bike. Behind the scenes, however, a combination of teamwork and technology ensures there’s a bike for you on the rack. Out of 11 staff members at Healthy Ride, 7 are part of the “rebalancing” team.

Rebalancing is the legwork that keeps a bike share program moving. In a given transit network, riders won’t move bikes between stations in equal numbers. A kiosk at 12th and Carson Streets on the South Side — next to Station Square and nearest to downtown — often runs low on bikes, while the rack at Liberty and Stanwix overflows with returns from cyclists pedaling downtown from other neighborhoods. To compensate for these different usage patterns, service representatives hit the road and redistribute bikes among stations as needed.

The team services 50 bikes in their shop and distributes 450 others around the city on a typical day — all accomplished via a single truck in the field from 9am to 7pm. Technology supports their heavy lifting, providing data, coordination, and communication. The same app that customers use (Nextbike) provides service staff with a full history of each bike, including the number of trips it has taken and any comments users have supplied about its working condition. In the truck, a driver and navigator use Google Hangouts to check in at each station they visit; Kieran uses the same app to tell the team where to go next.

Meanwhile, service staff are also trying to get ahead of the game by better predicting supply and demand. One important distinction lies between “rental” and “return” stations. On a typical gameday at PNC Park, for instance, the team adds bikes to downtown stations in anticipation of fans taking a bike from the parking garages to the North Shore. They then remove bikes from the Isabella Street station near the stadium to make room for extra returns there. The team has also identified another quirk of Pittsburgh’s riders: many bikes come down the hills, but fewer make their way back up. Call it the gravity effect.

Even if you’d rather leave it to Healthy Ride to take your bike back up the hill, customers can help the team out in other ways. When returning a bike, take the time to ensure you are doing it correctly — wait three seconds and give the bike a tug to make sure that it is fully secured to the dock. Kieran also wants to remind users that the onboard lock on each bike is best used to dock at a full station or in the event of an emergency, such as a flat tire or a mechanical problem. Finally, users should report problems with bikes on the Nextbike app. User-submitted data is added to the usage and alert history for each bike, giving staff a leg up on maintenance.

The early success of Healthy Ride has left Kieran optimistic about the future, as it “shows the demand for biking and bike lanes” in Pittsburgh. “I love working here. Working with bikes, who can be upset?”

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