SpotWheels

Inspiration: If you are a transit-rider, you know that the last mile takes longer than the entire trip. Especially when you are on your way back home. Buses don't run through all neighborhood blocks, and a car rideshare.

You wonder, "Hey, Limes/Birds/Spins exist. But how often do I take them?" One of these reasons could certainly be the cost. The other - they are not as available at neighborhoods as they are in city centers - leaving you still reliant on cars or a long walk. Our solution takes a stab at cost and availability at neighborhoods. As investment in bike-ped-friendly road infrastructure in metro Atlanta grows rapidly, we want to help citizens avail of more bikeshare opportunities for their regular trips.

What it does: We are designing planning tool for bikeshare providers to visualize latent demand of bikes, taking into account several factors:

• Bus routes that recently got cut off with MARTA's NextGen Bus Redesign
• Areas with Low-Car Ownership and/or low household income (American Community Survey)
• Areas with High Population Density
• Creating 10-min walksheds to strategically space the bikeshare hubs, so people don't have too far from their origin-destination

Challenges we ran into: We realized that building just the hubs isn't the end of the story, we need to tackle the cost part and we need people to return it at these strategically-chosen hubs so that other people can access them. We want to be cognizant that local jurisdictions are acutely bothered by improper parking of these devices blocking sidewalks and public right of way.

Accomplishments that we're proud of: So to incentivize proper parking at these hubs, we designed a widget to sit right within bikeshare mobile apps. This widget provides fare discounts or rebates for people to park it within the hubs and verifies this through a technology called geofencing as well as image detection systems currently in use.

What's next for SpotWheels: Collaborating on real-estate. We have to partner at the neighborhood level with entities willing to help us set up these 7ft by 7 ft hub spots. This can look like partnering with apartments similar to how zipcars currently borrow parking. We can partner with cities to allot some street parking - a spot equivalent to two car park spaces can fit in 10 bikes.

Built With

• github
• html
• python