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Comment by koji | Hacker News Reader

Call a bike in Germany is definitely a great system! viaCycle strives to improve on this by geo-fencing the bicycles when they need to be checked back into the system (and so you are no longer charged for usage). This helps maintain distribution and gives users reliable, structured locations to get bicycles, so they're not just strewn across cities.

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Yea, and logistical problems like that are what gets me excited about this.

In grad school I did research on a on increasing the average vehicle occupancy in cities and we took a lot of inspiration from the bike sharing programs.

Have you considered offering dynamic pricing based on the likelihood that the bike will be used in the near future? I.e. riding into the city should be cheaper than riding out of the city in most cases.

Absolutely! Dynamic pricing is something we're really excited about. It's still a young idea, but even large systems like Velib have implemented simple incentives for people who ride against traffic flow. Since our bikes always know where they are, we can be much more proactive about balancing each system.

Edit: a few of us did graduate transportation research as well, your work sounds cool. Is it published anywhere?

Nope, never got published. Our first project in grad school was writing a report on "The service centric car of 2020" [1] (don't read, it's bad). I spun off a project called "Sustainable urban mobility in the megacities of the future" with a friend and we both landed scholarships to do research in the US and publish a paper on it. Then I got involved with startups and was never heard or seen again in academia (I think I'm technically "on leave" from school)

[1] http://www.cdtm.de/events/entrepreneurship-camp/about-cdtm/b...

I'm writing my master's thesis on exactly that topic. http://control.ee.ethz.ch/index.cgi?page=sada;action=details...

a) a heuristic for optimal routing of repositioning trucks based on anticipated (uncertain) future demand.

b) dynamic pricing using a model predictive control approach (receding horizon optimization on a model of customer reaction to (price) incentives).

Insanely cool stuff. And its working. A paper should come out soon..

Let us know when it comes out! We'd love to give it a read.

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