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https://medium.com/@felixsalmon/323e11dd7679
Annual membership also makes it very easy to rent a bike (when the system is working): you just slide your key into the slot, and out comes the bike. I have lots of rides in the five-minute range: journeys I would otherwise have walked without any difficulty, but which are that much quicker and easier if I can just hop on a bike. Once you’re a member, the marginal cost of renting a bike is zero, which encourages one of the most common use cases — taking a CitiBike to a slightly further-away subway station which will get you to your destination more quickly. (“Instead of walking to the local, CitiBike to the express.”)
Daily and weekly rentals, by contrast, have none of that convenience. The docking stations come with tiny screens attached to unreliable credit card readers, and becoming a short-term CitiBike member is really hard work. Putting in your information takes loads of time and involves multiple screens; and even if you’ve managed to get to the end of that process, renting a bike then requires a whole separate set of steps, involving your credit card, dock numbers, and three-digit codes.
None of this is convenient; none of this is easy — even when it works, which, a lot of the time, it doesn’t. (CitiBike has been plagued with reports of failed credit-card transactions.) In most private-sector systems, the most profitable customers get the best service; in this one, they get the worst, with predictable results. I know some people who have actually bought spare annual CitiBike memberships for houseguests, just because they’ve learned that visitors will almost never jump through all the hoops necessary to take out a short-term rental.
The real problem, then, is not the pricing structure itself, so much as it is the station design, the user interface, and the general ease of use of the system. All of which was Alta’s problem to solve.
On top of that is another problem, which is the degree to which Citibank has become inextricably associated with CitiBike. That’s great for Citibank, of course, which got fantastic brand advertising at a very low cost. But it has also scared off any potential secondary sponsors. In principle, Alta can and should be selling lots of other sponsorships, perhaps in new geographic areas. But in practice, no one wants to sponsor the Citibikes, because they’re now completely associated with Citibank.
https://medium.com/@felixsalmon/323e11dd7679
Annual membership also makes it very easy to rent a bike (when the system is working): you just slide your key into the slot, and out comes the bike. I have lots of rides in the five-minute range: journeys I would otherwise have walked without any difficulty, but which are that much quicker and easier if I can just hop on a bike. Once you’re a member, the marginal cost of renting a bike is zero, which encourages one of the most common use cases — taking a CitiBike to a slightly further-away subway station which will get you to your destination more quickly. (“Instead of walking to the local, CitiBike to the express.”)
Daily and weekly rentals, by contrast, have none of that convenience. The docking stations come with tiny screens attached to unreliable credit card readers, and becoming a short-term CitiBike member is really hard work. Putting in your information takes loads of time and involves multiple screens; and even if you’ve managed to get to the end of that process, renting a bike then requires a whole separate set of steps, involving your credit card, dock numbers, and three-digit codes.
None of this is convenient; none of this is easy — even when it works, which, a lot of the time, it doesn’t. (CitiBike has been plagued with reports of failed credit-card transactions.) In most private-sector systems, the most profitable customers get the best service; in this one, they get the worst, with predictable results. I know some people who have actually bought spare annual CitiBike memberships for houseguests, just because they’ve learned that visitors will almost never jump through all the hoops necessary to take out a short-term rental.
The real problem, then, is not the pricing structure itself, so much as it is the station design, the user interface, and the general ease of use of the system. All of which was Alta’s problem to solve.
On top of that is another problem, which is the degree to which Citibank has become inextricably associated with CitiBike. That’s great for Citibank, of course, which got fantastic brand advertising at a very low cost. But it has also scared off any potential secondary sponsors. In principle, Alta can and should be selling lots of other sponsorships, perhaps in new geographic areas. But in practice, no one wants to sponsor the Citibikes, because they’re now completely associated with Citibank.
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