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Comment by kokey | Hacker News Reader

Potential for a lot of synergies here. Bigger fleet purchases and flexibility to move between daily and hourly rental, giving Avis card holders access to car sharing, the potential to cover more locations, etc.

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Hopefully one day you will be able to drop a Zipcar in another garage. That would be awesome!

London has a bicycle sharing scheme where you can rent a bike at one station and drop it off at another.

A side effect of this is in the mornings, when most traffic is from stations towards the city centre, there are no bikes at stations; and in the evenings, when most traffic is from the city centre towards the stations, there are no free return spots near stations. To compensate for this, lorryloads of vans shuttle back and forth in the opposite direction to the commuters.

Obviously, zipcar would follow a different demand pattern to a bike hire scheme, but there's still a risk there'd be large scale patterns in demand - for example in the holiday season all the zipcars might get driven to the airport.

That isn't an insurmountable problem, of course. Presumably Avis deal with this every day. But presumably they don't plan to turn Zipcar into Avis.

Paris' Velib system found that people didn't like riding up some of the steeper hills:

"See, Paris has a handful of steep hills. The Montmartre neighborhood, for example, is perched at the top of a rise some 450 feet above the Seine. Taking a bike down the hill has a certain obvious appeal, but riding back up to the top... not so much."

"Over the summer, though, the good people of Vélib added a simple behavioral incentive to the system: Return your bike to one of 100 stations perched over 60 meters above the rest of the city, and 15 minutes of free riding is added to your account."

http://globalmoxie.com/blog/velib-bonus~print.shtml

I think it's neat they managed to put some game mechanics in to the pricing model to encourage users to make the whole system work better for other users.

[ Continuing OT onto the Barclays Hire Bikes in London... ]

The Barclays Bike Hire coverage is good in central London but not good for the 'burbs. I'd consider using one every day for my commute however:-

* my commute would be right on the edge of 30 minutes (it's ~8 miles) and those bikes aren't the fastest (but that's good for training!). To be safe I'd have to break it up into two journeys with a 5 minute break in the middle to avoid being charged for £1 a usage on top of access. Or I can split it up into a cycle and then a run (good except that I sometimes I have to lug my work laptop with me which isn't idea for running).

* even with the upcoming (Spring 2014) extension to SW London I'm still going to be a 5 minute run from the nearest bikes. Right now it's a 4 mile run to the nearest docking station.

* no way to mount panniers, limited carrying space in the front 'basket' area, for bigger loads I'd need a rucksack and I much prefer panniers to a rucksack

£90 for annual Barclays Bike access (and no hire fees) is roughly comparable to the wear and tear costs for my current bike (~4000 commuting miles a year, proportional costs for brake blocks, chains, chainrings, sprockets, rims, hubs, bottom bracket, [carbon] forks). It's certainly cheaper than ~£900 for the annual train ticket.

Not having to worry about theft is a major plus, nor is having to carry good locks to lock up the bike should I have a mechanical that I can't fix quickly (I do the nursery run so I can't be home late).

I would also be helping the distribution problem as I'd be dropping off a bike near a major rail terminus in the morning, and using one from there to go home.

It feels like you're overstating the rebalancing that is done. Commuters themselves do skew the bikes one way in the morning, but on average take them back in the evening. People who don't live in London should not be given the impression that there is a massive effort to reshuffle the bikes, because there is not. It happens, but it doesn't seem overly common, much less part of the fundamental workings of the system.

I agree with others here: desolate stations could be refilled via economic incentives for riders.

I'm a heavy cycle hire user and face this problem all the time.

Solution seems straight-forward to me: if you park at an empty rack, or if you take a bike from a full rack your trip is free (if you are casual user) or you get small amount of credit (50p?) if you are a subscription user.

My experience with cyclehire though is they always choose the most complicated path. As an example they way over engineer their authentication. Besides a password you have to answer several security questions. Feels so disproportionate.

Someone could start by enhancing one of the several Boris Bikes apps with a "good samaritan" feature. Some people (like me) would find it fun to help out by returning a bike to a slightly different station on some trips. We'd help out for free. But as of now I don't know of any tools that encourage this.

Regarding complication of hiring Boris Bikes, note that if you want to do a one-time (without an existing account) hire of two bikes, you need to insert and remove your credit card 4 or 5 times, and will get two or three pieces of paper out! The UX is just insane.

I'm sure the impression you get depends on the stations you use. I go through Kings Cross at 18:30 so I often see bikes being loaded - At any other station I might have got a different impression!

According to [1] they have a fleet of 14 electric vans (pulling trailers of 20 bikes), 10 diesel cars (pulling the same trailers), 7 sprinter vans (16 bikes) and 3 DAF 7.5 tonne trucks (50 bikes each). But that fleet is to deal with peak demand, such as during tube strikes.

[1] http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/mindthegap/2011/01/moving_hire_bi...

Maybe you could give a bonus (price reduction, points) to customers that drops a car in an empty station.

And conversely, penalize trips to extremely popular stations. It ought to be doable purely through economics, although perhaps not without pissing off customers excessively.

If you make it a simple surcharge that's then fully payable to whoever will take the car in the opposite direction, it should be transparent enough that people won't see it as gouging.

You just described airline ticket prices.

Airlines are doing pure price discrimination, which creates some perverse incentives. Sometimes flying A-C-B is cheaper than A-C, which penalizes us for making C-B seats available, simply because most people going to C are on business.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airline_booking_ploys

There are some differences. For example, an airline needs to hire a pilot to fly the plane regardless. For the return trip on a route that's popular in only one direction, if nobody wants to take the plane for a very low price, the airline will fly it empty. For Zipcar, it could conceivably be worthwhile to actually pay customers to drive cars from a popular destination to a popular origin, to avoid having to pay their own workers to do it. But the overall idea is no doubt the same.

D.C. has a bike sharing program but I think they require the bike rental company to make sure there are always bikes available at all bike stations. I saw a guy restocking the bike racks and he explained it was part of the deal with the city in order to be allowed to operate.

The Service level agreement is having one spot or one bike at a station 90% of the time, among other metrics they look at. They also have a dashboard [1] that shows aggregate metrics for the DC system monthly.

[1] http://cabidashboard.ddot.dc.gov/CaBiDashboard/

Daimler's "Car2go" service (available here in Vancouver and some other cities) allows you to leave the car anywhere in their core service area.

http://car2govancouver.com/

Airport garages, specifically, would be huge.

That would be nice, but it would only really become practical with self driving vehicles, or maybe with enough scale.

https://www.car2go.com

Better let them know it's not possible to avoid returning cars to their place of rental yet...

Car2go does do one way, but it's not always the best solution:

It's more expensive, the cars are all smart cars, and you have to leave the car within a home location.

Car2go just seems like a drive-it-yourself taxi to me. If you have any need for that sort of thing it could even be a complementary service to Zipcar, but I would never use it as a replacement.

Drive yourself taxi is pretty accurate. In Vancouver it's closer in cost to a bus ride for a couple people going a few km.

Once we get to self driving vehicles, they'll probably be evolve into more like an affordable taxi service.

Also, insurance for actual rentals from Budget/Avis for Zipcar members.

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