The secret data collected by dockless bikes is helping cities map your movement ...sparks concerns...
The secret data collected by dockless bikes is helping
cities map your movement
Lime and other companies are gathering masses of
location-based information that some cities are leveraging to improve their
streets.
by Elizabeth Woyke September 28, 2018
Ask Tim Corcoran about the most popular destinations for
bike-share trips in South Bend, Indiana, and he can give you a list, or even
GPS latitude and longitude coordinates. As the city’s planning director,
Corcoran is responsible for overseeing a program that enables residents to rent
bicycles via a mobile app and then pick them up and drop them off pretty much
wherever and whenever they want. He doesn’t actually run the rental service,
though. Lime, a Silicon Valley startup, manages the program and keeps Corcoran
in the loop via a steady stream of data about bike activity in South Bend.
Lime is able to collect this information because its
bikes, like all those in dockless bike-share programs, are built to operate
without fixed stations or corrals. Instead, they transmit their location every
few seconds using built-in GPS chips, 3G wireless connections, and solar power.
When combined with the Lime app, the setup lets customers locate available
bikes and rent them at $1 for 30 minutes. Once done with their trip, riders can
park the bikes practically anywhere and electronically lock them with a few
taps on their phone. This enables Lime to see where a ride starts and ends, and
where the bike travels in between those two points.
In the 18 months or so since dockless bike-share arrived
in the US, the service has spread to at least 88 American cities. (On the
provider side, at least 10 companies have jumped into the business; Lime is one
of the largest.) Some of those cities now have more than a year of data related
to the programs, and they’ve started gleaning insights and catering to the
increased number of cyclists on their streets.
South Bend is one of those leaders. It asked Lime to
share data when operations kicked off in June 2017. At first, Lime provided the
information in spreadsheets, but in early 2018 the startup launched a
browser-based dashboard where cities could see aggregate statistics for their
residents, such as how many of them rented bikes, how many trips they took, and
how far and long they rode. Lime also added heat maps that reveal where most
rides occur within a city and a tool for downloading data that shows individual
trips without identifying the riders. Corcoran can glance at his dashboard and
see, for example, that people in South Bend have taken 340,000 rides, traveled
158,000 miles, and spent more than 7 million minutes on Lime bikes since the
company started service. He can also see there are 700 Lime bikes active in the
city, down from an all-time high of 1,200 during the University of Notre Dame’s
2017 football season.
It’s the trip-level data that’s the most intriguing,
though. Corcoran says South Bend is considering using that information to
decide where to place new bike paths and protected bike lanes. Earlier this
year, the city used the data to determine the most popular bike drop-off areas
on its sidewalks. It then marked them with paint and began encouraging people
to leave their bikes there. Eventually, hundreds of these “preferred parking
locations” could dot the city, according to Corcoran. (The idea might seem to
conflict with the free-spirited vibe of dockless bike-share, but experts say
residents and operators generally like the reliability of designated pick-up
and drop-off zones as long as there are a number of them and people don’t have
to walk more than a few minutes to reach one.)
Seattle, which has had Lime bikes since July 2017 and is
now home to 5,000 of them, has similar plans. In March, the city created five
parking areas for the bikes on its sidewalks after analyzing the company’s
usage data. Seattle aims to roll out more of these zones and carve out space
for new bike corrals and bike lanes on streets, according to Joel Miller, who
heads the city’s bike-share program. “We’re really excited to continue to
gather this data and figure out where people choose to ride and where bikes are
congregating,” says Miller. “It will help us designate [bike] parking and where
it might make sense for the city to invest in more general [bike]
infrastructure.”
Some experts question whether companies should share
GPS-based information about routes, even if it helps cities make infrastructure
decisions. “With dockless bikes, you suddenly have the ability to ride directly
to your house and leave the bike there,” says Kate Fillin-Yeh, the strategy
director for the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO).
“That opens up a host of new concerns when paired with location services.”
In theory, the fact that people can park dockless bikes
outside their exact destinations could make it easier for someone who hacked
into the data to decode the anonymous identities that companies assign their
users. That hacker then might be able to figure out the biking trips that
specific people took. Fillin-Yeh thinks cities should hire independent auditors
to make sure bike-share companies are safeguarding riders’ data privacy.
Lime says it’s just trying to be a “good partner” to
cities. “We believe [this information exchange] is necessary for us to build a
strong basis of trust with cities [that want to see] these fundamental metrics
of our operations,” says Emily Warren, Lime’s director of policy and public
affairs.
Mollie Pelon McArdle, who works on technology policy for
NACTO, says a number of cities are still figuring out how to manage and interpret
the data they receive from dockless bike-share operators. Lime’s operations
across dozens of US cities generate tens of millions of data points a day,
according to Snowflake, a startup that runs the cloud data warehouse where Lime
stores its information.
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