Divvy bike customer service full#

But many systems haven’t done so publicly, let alone tried to figure out a national average. It’s possible for a bike share operator to estimate its marginal cost per trip. There’s a fee with every credit card transaction.There’s a certain probability that a trip will give the bike or its station a bit more wear and tear than it’d get by just sitting unused.There’s a certain probability that a trip will involve a customer service phone call.Rebalancing is the single largest operating expense for most bike share systems.

Most importantly, there’s a certain probability that a given trip will remove the final bike from a popular station, forcing a staffer to show up with a truck of bikes to refill (“rebalance”) the empty station.

But bike share trips do actually create some additional costs: After all, the bikes and stations are already sitting there. bike share system.Īt first, it might seem as if each ride would cost the system nothing. Trouble is, nobody has ever tried to publicly figure out what this number is for a U.S. But the marginal cost per transaction still matters, because it’s one way to calculate how low a system’s base fare can get - and also how much subsidy a fare-discount program like Divvy’s will require. Public bike share systems aren’t private businesses, so they should value more than just profitability. The marginal cost per transaction is the invisible price point where the experience of getting a new customer flips from “every transaction helps” to “some transactions help but some don’t.” Charge less than your marginal cost and you start to lose money on each sale. If a public bike share system were a private business, this would be one of its most important statistics: the marginal cost per transaction. In most cases, that’s the price floor for a business’s discount offers.

Divvy bike customer service full#

So after getting the first year at $5, a Divvy for Everyone member sees the rate rise to $50 per year (or $5 per month), then to the full $99 per year (or $10 per month) in year three.įair enough, but we still wanted to know: How much money does a bike share system lose on each $5 annual membership it sells? The average cost of each additional bike share trip would be a very useful number to knowĪ Divvy Bikes station. The Chicago Department of Transportation decided that if it offered the $5 per year indefinitely, it’d lose too much money. Last week, we reported on the nation’s most popular discount: Half of all Chicagoans qualify for an introductory $5-per-year Divvy Bikes membership, and 1,450 Chicagoans took advantage in the last 12 months.

That’s why discount programs for low-income people are important. Still, many people struggle to justify bike share memberships, especially if they don’t use the system daily - after all, bike sharing is often an add-on to public transit rather than a primary mode that can actually get you out of a transit pass or a car payment. Nobody knows quite how low the price of a bike share trip can go.Ĭompared to a daily bus rider, a daily bike share rider with a monthly or annual pass pays very little per trip. But how cheap? Equitable bike sharing depends on the answer.