Marcus -
I could imagine riding quite a bit farther or shorter if there was an LCD
display or Bluetooth signaling to an phone that told me I could save (or
make) a few dollars by changing my destination and walking the rest.
Many of us are natural "optimizers", if given a mark to hit, we will
seek to hit it even if there is (little?) more incentive than having
"hit the mark".
If I'm alone, I will park the car hundreds of feet from the store I'm going
to do if there is any indication of congestion, just because I don't like
looking around, and negotiating with pedestrians, and especially other
cars. And I like to walk unless there is a hailstorm or something.
Precisely... like that.
My version: In a congested city, I drive right up to the venue entrance
and make *everyone* get out, then go find a spot. I rarely need to be
at the venue (shopping, museum, restaurant) as long as others and
*loathe* having a car full of people telling me to break various laws,
rules of etiquette and sometimes physics to grab a parking spot they
thought they saw, thought was legal, "back there!" etc. If I'm alone I
can almost *always* get a good spot fairly quickly with zero
aggravation. Sometimes I think of taking up smoking, as a treat during
my walk from the parking spot to the venue (and back).
If there is a systematic problem in balancing the bikes, I should think the
`system' should rebalance.
I think the bulk of the "imbalance" is a transient, order 8 hours long
(between opposite legs of a commute). I'm sure there is some
"migration" to some sinks and from some sources due to asymmetries in
behaviour (commute in, get met by your spouse/friend with a car on the
way home?).
However, it sounds like the bulk movers are
high latency, which would be an appeal of getting individuals in a populous
area to do it, assuming there are enough of them that find the incentive
strong enough.
The bulk movers are also probably inefficient and expensive by some
measures compared to a distributed, fine grain solution.
And to make it easy enough to enlist, to help the system "trust" the
class of people (probably don't have credit cards?) who would benefit
from this "job". The infrastructure for this is already in place
(ticket "kiosks", transfer passes, etc.), it just requires a convincing
model and buy in at the right level?
Send Guerin & Crue to NYC with the Venice Table.. let Gondolas be
Bicycles, etc.
- Steve
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