Welcome Back

If you found yourself here as a result of reading the previous article — The Shared Bike — A Tortured Hero or Villain? — then you are awesome! If you got here without reading the previous article, then either read it here (it’s a great little read), or, I can summarise it for you — though it won’t have the same wit as the full article.

Here is the main argument:

1. Bikes are a good thing, inherently.
2. By the same token- decentralised, shared bikes (no docks) are good as well.
3. Unfortunately, these bikes have an annoying bi-product — pilled-up bike carcasses.
4. Bike carcasses are a result of people misbehaving. True. But the fault of an unintended use of a product is always — the product itself, not the users using it. Something is flawed in the shared bike design that is resulting in this behaviour.
5. As a result, we need to point the finger at bike companies — their products are broken and it’s affecting our cities.

This article will dissect where the design might be broken and what may be possible to be done about it.

So where does the design break? Let the dissection begin!

But first, a confession: I originally wrote a long piece about how different aspects of the bikes design may contribute to the bikes’ demise, dissecting the problem to all of its possible parts and exploring each. But, it had one small shortcoming — I wrote, from the comfort of my cafe seat. It was all theoretical + observational + anecdotal, all great ingredients for developing user and product empathy, but it lacked one important ingredient — true immersion.

To give me a little bit of slack, I’m still recovering from a broken leg (roller skating accident) so naturally, I’m cautious of stepping onto anything with wheels. But step onto them I did, and soon after, I realised that though my original thinking was still valid, I seem to have missed one important part, a part that probably accounts for the majority of the problem— The Lock Is Broken. If you improve the design of and around the lock, most things should fall into place and we may see a sharp decrease of them bike carcasses around our cities. This piece is dedicated to this issue, the original, more over-arching piece will be published at a later time.

Designing Out the Behaviour

If we want to be rid of the bike carcasses we need to be rid of the ‘destructing’ behaviour that brings them about. There are two main ways for us to get there

The Precursor

One way we could take, is to figure out the precursor to the behaviour — what need is being had that leads to the will to go about the behaviour in the first place? You then design for it at that level. This is a preventative measure, think- stopping crime by reducing poverty, or treating depression by reducing abuse. That is part of the more ‘holistic’ approach I originally explored. It is a great approach that I inherently believe in its value and yet, it is also much harder to go about and takes much longer. I decided that ultimately as I mentioned before, it could be solved in a much simpler way.

The Blockade

The second way, is to accept that at some point in time, the behaviour will occur, or people will at least try and perpetrate it. You could then tweak the design so that you could stop the behaviour from fully taking place or at least from re-occurring. We are going to go ahead with this second approach.

The Behaviour

Before we continue, I thought it might be worthwhile to align on the kind of behaviour we refer to. There are at least two annoying things about the bikes at the moment. The first one, is we have the bike carcasses that are pilling up in oceans, trees, rooftops etc. The second is bikes that are positioned at normal spots around the city, but are just thrown on the floor, carelessly, looking awful, but not ruined by malice per se. The behaviour we are going to be focusing on here is the former — the malice, felon type of behaviour. It is annoying seeing a good bike thrown on the side of the road. But, it is not as blood-boiling-infuriating to see bikes thrown off cliffs, or put a-flamed or what not. The latter, less fury causing, will be addressed in another piece.

What Users Are We Designing For?

Next in our piece, we need to figure out who is causing this behaviour. If you know who is causing the behaviour then you can design for it appropriately. Every user type may require a slightly different solution and you need to know if you are designing for only one specific one or all of them.

Is the behaviour perpetrated by official users of the bike service? Or is just caused by rascals on the fringes? By a small group of people or is it a larger population issue?

Our problem however, is that for the moment, we do not know for certain who is causing the behaviour. To discover that, we will need to spend time conducting more interviews and staking out on the streets; I would highly recommend the bike companies to do so properly but for now, we are designing blind. And so, in the absence of information, we have to cast our net wide, speculate and design for them all.

Let’s say its Non-Official Users:

Who are non-official users and why start with them?

Non-official users are those who never signed-up for the service. They are people on the side, who have the luxury of absolute anonymity since they never gave the platform any information about them. They find a bike, ride it, trash it, and no one will never know it was them.

We don’t know for sure that they are the ones breaking the bikes, but we have some pretty good grounds to speculate that they may have a hand in it.

Nothing to Lose

Firstly, they have the least amount to lose. Not just personally, from repercussion, we have already established that they are acting anonymously, but for the actual demise of the service. If they haven’t signed-up for it, they probably don’t care about it as much or they would have gone through the process of doing so; and though they use it here and there, they wouldn’t care if the service is stopped, so damaging the bikes affects them less. (Note, it is possible that they actually do really care about the bikes and simply don’t have a way in, due for example to the lack of a credit card, but I would leave this option out for now, we will design for it in a later piece).

Secondly, if they are indeed using the bikes, without ever signing up for it, then they have less intrinsic appreciation for them (less than official users do). Valuing the bikes is actually an overarching problem with the service in general. People typically don’t value a public property as much as they value a personal one. Moreover, they usually value it even less if it is very cheap or free (which is by the way, why event organisers often see a higher attendance rate when they charge for tickets than when it is free). If you are a user who hasn’t even signed up for the service all together, i.e. even given the value of your information away, then the product has the least value in your eyes.

So if you value the product less and you have less to lose and on top of that you feel the impunity of full anonymity, you are more likely to go about and damage the bikes. Hell you may even think its funny — you can do whatever you want and no one can touch you. In a way you have power over the system, and power corrupts. It is not to say that everyone who uses the bikes without being an official user automatically becomes a felon, but you are more likely to. Inevitably though, you have to be a bit of an inner dick to ahead with it.

A Back-Door, a Broken-Lock.

Wait, so non-official users are dicks, and they may be breaking our bikes. That is clear, but, how the hell are they getting access to them in the first place? Can you guess? Well, The Lock is Broken.

The shared bikes have a cool design feature — a back wheel lock (very popular in the Netherlands) that you can lock and unlock with a code or a QR code. When you log-in to the platform and select a bike, you use one of the two to unlock it. When you end your ride, you are supposed to lock-up the bike again, end of story — Easy enough. I have tried it myself — I opened it, rode it, parked it, jumped on the app and specified that the ride was over, then I walked away. Only that I came back to the bike moments later as I suddenly remembered — I didn’t lock the bike. The lock was still open, the bike was free to be taken by anyone. Soon after that moment, I started noticing these unlocked bikes everywhere!. Sitting there on the side of the road, waiting for someone to pick them up, someone who may not even be signed up to the platform. And that is our back door. The lock design is broken and non-users might be using it to break in.

On my journey of bike exploration I also noticed a bunch of kids, going from bike to bike, looking for something, then one of them would yell out “this one is unlocked!”. The kids will hop on and ride away, taking the bikes to, I don’t know where. I am not saying that these kids are the bike killers, but, a bike killer, let’s call them a bikenator, will sure use this backdoor to act if it was available.

Keeping The Door Shut

How do we stop them bikenators from getting access to the back door? We keep it shut. How so? We Fix The Lock. You could do this in a few ways.

Automatic Locking- For one, you can make the lock shut automatically; that way you don’t have to require the user to do anything, the locking happens all on its own and we hopefully see the inevitable reduction in bike carcasses we hoped for. Perhaps however, this automatic locking is actually already programmed into the bike and all the bikes I noticed just had broken locks. If that is so, then the solution is even simpler, all you need is to just fix the locks, end of story. Or perhaps even, the automatic locking is not broken at all, it just takes some time to happen, say x minutes; If that is true, and I doubt it is, then the solution is even more simple, reduce the time required for automatic locking to a few minutes or less and we have got our selves a solution.

Make The Users Do It- You could also take an analogue approach and just make the riders (official users) lock it. Well, the intention is for them to do so already, but if they are not doing it, and many of them are not, then use all the tools in your tool-box to increase the chance that they will. For example, you could give them a reminder soon after they press ‘end trip’ asking them to please lock the bike. Hell, you could even set it up in a way that they can’t press ‘end trip’ unless they first lock the bike. And if you want, you can take an even stricter approach, you can tell them, that if a bike is not locked, and is found damaged, the fault will be assigned to them. In that you would be creating a consequence mentality, that would make them check twice before they leave the bike. None of these moves will result in full compliance, but they will increase the % of users locking the bikes up. And in the case that the bikenators actually do use this back door, then that number is directly related to the number of bikes we see pilled on the side of the road.

Do They Even Need The Door?

In thinking about this problem-solution space, I thought that an assumption that could be challenged is that the bikenators don’t even need the bikes to be unlocked in order to trash them. They could easily pick them up and carry them to their grave. Only that it is not really that easy.

First, doing anything to a bike usually requires some manoeuvring, and it is much easier to do so if you can ride the bike to its future place of rest. If the bikes doesn’t appear to be near anything useful for its demise, you will have to carry the bike with you. And though it is possible, you could just pick it up and walk away, the bikes are quite heavy and the extra effort of carrying it around may just not be exciting enough to go ahead with the stupid bike trashing plan.

Second, is the location that you will have to schlep the bikes from. Bikes that are used in a healthy way are usually left in a public place, be it a park, a street, a bus stop, because that is where the users needed to ride it to. Stealing a bike from a public place is just a little bit more attention-grabbing, especially if you are not riding, but carrying it around. So yes, it is still possible to steal and then trash the bikes even if they are locked. But it is at least somewhat more of an inconvenience.

Wrapping it Up

The more I write about the subject, the more I realise I have much more to say than could fit in a short article. So, for now, I will finish this one here.

The bike carcasses we see on the side of the road, they are a result of something that is broken in the design of the bike, something that allows this behaviour to happen. Know who is causing the behaviour and you could design something to stop it. We don’t know who is to be blame, but a good few reasons makes us think that it is very possibly has to do with use by non official users of the service — people who are using the bikes and then trashing them, and doing completely undetected. How are they getting in? that is where the design may be broken, the culprit explored is the design of the lock. A fault in the lock design has created a back-door to reach the bike and allow non-official users a way in. Fix the lock and we may see a big decrease in bike carcasses and then we could all sleep more easily at night.

That is however, not the whole story. This solution is only going to work if the bikenators are non-official users. But, what if the bikenators are actually already in the system, riding amongst us? Well, to explore that and continue our pursuit for bike justice and improved product design, you can continue reading my third piece on the topic here.

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