Need a ride? Research improves NYC bike sharing through real-time crowdsourcing

Newswise — ITHACA, N.Y. -- Cornell University research improved bike sharing in New York City by providing tools to ensure bikes are available when and where they’re needed through a crowdsourcing system that now evaluates bicycle usage in real time.

Citi Bike redistributes its bicycles around New York City using a program called Bike Angels, which is based on research by David Shmoys, the Laibe/Acheson Professor of Business Management and Leadership Studies in the School of Operations Research and Information Engineering at Cornell.

Through Bike Angels, cyclists earn points adding up to free rides by using or returning bikes at certain high-need stations. Because of commuting patterns, residential neighborhoods face shortages of bicycles in the morning rush, while neighborhoods like the Financial District and Midtown are more likely to run out of bikes in the evening. Similarly, parking docks can be full at certain hours, making it difficult or impossible for users to return the bikes when they’ve reached their destinations.

Shmoys and his team recently refined Bike Angels by developing an algorithm that can make real-time decisions about which stations to incentivize, or award points for using. Previous versions of the program made decisions based on historical usage patterns. The system now re-evaluates data every 30 minutes. Citi Bike, which was responsible for nearly half of the nation’s 30 million bike-sharing rides last year, implemented changes based on Shmoys’ findings in the summer of 2017.

With co-authors Hangil Chung ’18 and Daniel Freund, Ph.D. ’18, Shmoys wrote “Bike Angels: An Analysis of Citi Bike’s Incentive Program,” a recently released report showing the effectiveness of this approach.

“The ability to make decisions that are sensitive to exactly what are today’s conditions enables us to be much more effective in assigning those points,” said Shmoys, who is also associate director of Cornell’s Institute for Computational Sustainability.

The research was funded in part by the National Science Foundation.

Cornell University has television, ISDN and dedicated Skype/Google+ Hangout studios available for media interviews. For additional information, see this Cornell Chronicle story.

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