Thefts puncture Paris bike scheme
news.bbc.co.uk
news.bbc.co.uk
http://www.streetsblog.org/2009/02/12/reports-of-velibs-demi...
Maybe one day, the peninsula will have a quality bike sharing network to help solve Caltrain's last mile problem. One day...
Why on earth is an advertiser operating bikes?
The city of Paris lets him use its outdoor displays for free. It seems the only advantage for the mayor is that he can claim the bike system works at no cost. This is probably the reason why he lets the advertiser keep secret the amount of his revenues from the displays. That barely honest financing scheme looks like the main problem.
It's funny; I've lived in both Paris and Seattle, two cities which have the expensive and difficult-to-maintain electronic public toilets which automatically clean themselves after every use. The ones in Paris are run by JCDecaux (same company who is doing the bike rentals), and although they are dreadful to use, they work (and have worked) for years.
In Seattle, the city was approached by JCDecaux to build public toilets in exchange for putting advertising near them, but were refused. Seattle decided instead to use millions of taxpayer dollars to form their own ad-free version. The toilets rarely worked (and in any case were constantly occupied by crackheads). 2 or 3 years later, the city cut their losses and unsuccessfully tried to sell the toilets on eBay.
The same goes for the internet, nowadays if you design anything at all that has an end-user component you'll spend at least as much time at making it jerk-proof and doing all kinds of abuse analysis as you spend on doing features.
Like I think Twitter says they have <30 people, and 2 of them are dedicated just to handling spam accounts. That's ridiculous.
Think of the features it could have if those 2 extra people were actually getting stuff done.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22always+blames+his+tools%22
Echoes of Kozmo: http://money.cnn.com/2005/09/14/technology/kozmo_redux
No more 50-cent deliveries [...]
Customers of Kozmo.com who fondly remember getting single pints of ice cream delivered on a whim won't get off that easy this time. MaxDelivery has a $10 minimum order, and there's a $4.95 delivery charge for orders under $50. Siragusa said this is to keep customers from abusing the system, as they did with Kozmo, and he says MaxDelivery's average order size is much different than Kozmo's.
"Someone ordered a pack of Mentos. Then two hours later they'd order a pint of ice cream," said Siragusa. "People did this because there was no penalty. Kozmo had a number of orders that were unprofitable."
Kozmo's founders designed its system to reward customers for making frequent low-value orders. When the customer base responded in a way that should have been predicted by the Kozmo founders, instead of recognizing and fixing their error, those founders instead called it "abuse".
It seems to me that work must be done to create value, and work must be done to make the system idiot proof (despite the continuing ingenuity of idiots), and this is true regardless of the talent and abilities of those producing the service or product.
Work (value creation) can be more or less efficient. As stated, an inefficient workman blames his tools, instead of the way he is going about his work. In this case, and often in other cases, the customer base forms part of the toolset. The workman is saying that his tools are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, and that it is their fault.
Here is more on this phenomenon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Locus_of_control
Internals tend to attribute outcomes of events to their own control. Externals attribute outcomes of events to external circumstances.
In the present case, the customer base would be seen as uncontrollable (only susceptible to external control) by the inefficient workman, and controllable (susceptible to internal control) by the efficient workman.
work must be done to create value [...] regardless of [...] talent and abilities
Yes. But do you mean, as Marxists contend, that variance in ability plays little or no role in variance in the efficiency of the work?: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value#Marx.27s_...
I do not subscribe to this theory. Toolsets can be changed, improved or mastered. I can do none of these with my customers. I can only do it with the things I use to create my services. I use tools to create services to assist my customers. Calling my customers "tools" does not help me.
The workman is saying that his tools are not doing what they are supposed to be doing, and that it is their fault.
I disagree with this analysis. The workman is saying that there are (usually a small number of) customers who require that the services be more complex in their implementation than might otherwise be expected. This is not the same thing. I know that around 80% to 90% of my customers never provoke the inbuilt protection systems in my code. The protection systems account for about 50% of my code. I have measured these things because I work in the defense industry. I know that around half my code is there because up to 20% of my customers don't use the system the way it was intended to be used. Whether this is lack of training, lack of awarenes, or malice doesn't matter. I don't "blame" them, but I know that if my customers only did what they were shown in training, and didn't do what they are trained not to do, 50% of my code would be unnecessary.
But do you mean, as Marxists contend, that variance in ability plays little or no role in variance in the efficiency of the work?
Of course not. I mean that for every worker, some of their work is producing features and facilities, and some of their work is protecting against inappropriate actions. The balance between these two might change with the abilities of the workers, but I suspect not much. It's a pretty constant ratio across my programmers. To assume what you seem to have assumed from what I have said is, again, perplexing. Perhaps we constantly talk past each other, but I'm finding it difficult in general to understand your mindset.
> Toolsets can be changed, improved or mastered. I [cannot] do [this] with my customers.
You cannot provide any value to the world that would involve a different customer base? After Kozmo re-emerged as MaxDelivery, it changed its customer base (one of its tools in value creation) by starting out with only high-density neighborhoods of Manhattan (and it continues to change its customer base as it gradually expands its delivery areas). It has mastered its customer base (again, one of its tools in value creation) by learning how that tool reacts to various delivery deals, and by employing improved delivery deals. Please see the article linked above.
For at least many decades, bike-sharing advocates and politicians have been failing to efficiently employ the tools at their disposal, one of which is their customer base. That tool, the customer base, has been blamed over and over again as "the problem" as bike-sharing advocates and politicians have repeatedly employed essentially the same defectively-designed policies.
By that analogy usenet was 'asking for it' because it was open, worked and actually contained great content. Of course that meant that it was ideal for the jerks of this world to try to peddle their wares, eventually resulting in the near destruction of usenet.
On the web the relationship between the number of people that you have to employ to look after abusers vs the number of people that are actually productive is a good way to measure your success....
Yes. That is what I said. The workman with internal-locus-of-control improves his value-creation system based on feedback, and is seen as more successful. The workman with external-locus-of-control blames parts of his value-creation system for acting (in his eyes) wrongly, and is seen as less successful.
Separation of concerns is as useful in customer identification as it is in writing software.
I agree that blaming the customer base for the failure of the bike-sharing schemes is wrong, and I agree that it may be that changing the target customer base is the only effective solution, but do not agree that calling that "changing your toolset" is helpful.
Viewing the customer as a part of my toolset does not make them internal. A defining feature of my toolset is that it is under my control. The customers I have are not under my control.
Viewing the way I generate my customer base from the collection of potential customers is largely under my control, but that is not the same thing. My customer base is more under my control, but is still not part of my toolset.
I have control over what I produce, and viewing what I produce as a mechanism for selecting customers is useful. Realising, and explicitly using, the fact that what I produce will implicitly determine the customers I get is valuable.
This is not achieved by viewing customers as part of the toolset.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma
Although we'd all be better off if we all cooperated, there will always be those who take their personal advantage and screw everyone else.
It's too easy to label them as sociopaths, and in some sense they are, but game theory ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory ) predicts this behaviour.
It sucks, but you won't change it.
This also has consequences for social networks, such as Hacker News. It's OK when everyone shares a common purpose and common interests, but get enough newbies and the culture won't propagate.
The various car share schemes that require significant buy-in and have penalties for non-compliance and that shifts the game theory into a configuration that works. Maybe something similar will eventually be required for social networks too.
Too often these days people simply say "Tragedy of the Commons", wring their hands, and say that people are idiots. I was trying to make it clearer that game theory really does predict this behavior, that it's not irrational, that it is to be expected, and you have to change the rules to change the behavior.
Exactly how to change the rules is left as an exercise for the interested reader.
They could still get damaged and returned as such, but at least they couldn't get completely stolen, which is the most valuable thing for criminals to do since that actually gets them money.
Also,
>credit cards are very rare in france
You mean you guys don't generally allow yourselves to get deep into debt at absurd interest rates? I can't imagine living in a country like that!
Next you're going to tell me that when you have
I've been in the US 7 years and I haven't quite yet understood why credit cards companies and banks are separate entities. (regulation?)
So when credit cards came around, it probably wasn't an existing bank saying "maybe we'll let people go negative and then charge them huge interest"; it was a separate entity offering people what essentially is a way to be conveniently loaned money.
They probably just never integrated into 1 entity.
There may be regulation as well, but none that I know.
However credit cards do exist, even if they have been maligned for a long time in media:
Major credit card issuers in France are often linked to the retail sector (see http://www.pass.fr) .. others got consolidated into traditional banks (cetelem for example)
The traditionally French "no permanent credit" model for banks tend to raise fees and favour low deposits I guess.
In both cases anyway the banks pray on the poor / moderately poor people to "dress them up" with all sorts of products and credits they don't need. (And arguably, that society pays up after 30 years)
That's a much better incentive than the guy who built the system had.
It would also be helpful (and maybe costly) to implement some RFID solution to keep track of the unique bikes and the user pairs. If a bike is damaged, the rider can fill out a form online and the company can charge-back the previous user if its not standard wear and tear. This would cut down on the vandalism of the bikes.
"The Bicycle Thief 2: Paris" coming to theaters next year? [ http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19... ]
But I think they have to put an artifically low hold of 150€ on the bike (instead of the real cost of 400€) because far fewer could and/or would use it if that much money was held.
A lot of the bikes are stolen from people who rented them (and in this case, maybe the person doesn't have to pay the 150€ if he/she can prove it?). Some are stolen from the trucks that are used to regularly transfer bikes across the city to even the distribution. Some people figured out how to hack the kiosk to give them multiple bikes for one payment (that has since been patched). Also, people can of course get them with stolen credit cards and by breaking the lock. You can see how the thefts can add up.
I don't think the system is doomed though because people in Paris absolutley love the Velibs and want them to stay. I'm sure that they'll figure something out, whether it's higher rental costs, extra security or something else.
Championed by Paris Mayor Bertrand Delanoe, the bikes were part of an attempt to "green" the capital. [...]
The original contract gave the advertising company a 10-year licence to exploit 1,600 city-wide billboards in return for running the scheme [...]
The scheme was modelled on one in Lyon [...]
It is also being copied overseas with London, San Francisco and Singapore all intending to set up similar schemes.