Abstract
Bike sharing is an important tool to reduce congestion and pollution in urban areas. Electrically Power Assisted Bicycles (EPAC’s) make cycling possible also for sedentary people. Standard EPAC’s are difficultly integrable into a free-floating sharing system because the battery pack requires frequent recharging. This paper studies the challenges, opportunities and solutions of implementing a free-floating bike sharing system based on electric bicycles. The analysis revolves around the charge sustaining paradigm. The idea of charge sustaining leverages the metabolic efficiency gaps to reduce the overall physical effort required without determining a net discharge of the battery. Already validated in private bicycles, the idea needs to be modified and adapted to the challenges of a shared fleet. The paper analyzes two approaches to the fleet level energy management and assistance control of a fleet of charge sustaining bicycles. Specifically, we compare a fixed price approach against a flexible pricing approach where the user can select the cost based on the pedaling effort they are willing to exercise. A simulation framework (calibrated on data collected during a large trial in Milan, Italy) assesses the operational costs and revenues of the two approaches quantifying how they depend on the design and environmental parameters. We provide and validate a lower bound in terms of usage rate that guarantees economic sustainability, additionally showing that a flexible pricing strategy can lower this bound and grant more degrees of freedom to the users.
Highlights
The decarbonization process our society needs to undertake requires a deep change in how we understand mobility
This paper studies the challenges, opportunities and solutions of implementing a freefloating bike sharing system based on electric bicycles
We focused on the bicycle-level energy management
Summary
The decarbonization process our society needs to undertake requires a deep change in how we understand mobility. A number of companies (Uber, Jump and Lime to name three) launched free floating EPAC sharing systems Operating these services is challenging: in addition to the complexities of managing a bicycle sharing system, the operators need to make sure that the batteries are always charged. We study the feasibility and potentials of free floating electric bike sharing comparing two fleet-level energy management systems and the corresponding pricing strategies. The paper is structured as follows: Section II describes the characteristic of the free-floating bike-sharing service and the Bitride trial used as the basis for the work. This intervention guaranteed that the bicycle availability was almost at 100% all the time This type of intervention is expensive; limiting the cost of these interventions is the main goal of the charge sustaining paradigm when applied to bike sharing.
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