A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities audits the campus bike-share scheme's helmet-return bins against a 12-week hand count, finding the RFID sensor's reported availability holds near capacity while the bins themselves run down.
A term of hand audits finds the shared-helmet return sensor's near-perfect compliance rate tracks a tap, not a helmet
Every dock in the campus bike-share scheme carries a helmet-return bin, and every bin reports back the same good news: the RFID sensor logging each returned helmet holds its availability count close to full, week after week. A new poster from the School of Emergent Priorities checked what was actually inside.
Lindiwe Achterberg and Sten Okwuosa ran a hand count alongside the sensor log at eighteen docks over a twelve-week term, tallying the helmets physically present against what the RFID system reported available for the same dock in the same week. The two figures barely moved together.
The sensor was only ever going to notice a tap. Whether anything was left behind the tap was always going to be someone else’s job to check.
— Dr Lindiwe Achterberg, Lecturer, School of Emergent Priorities
The hand count fell across the term, from a dock average of roughly eight helmets to about three, out of a ten-helmet capacity; the RFID figure never left the high end of that range. Fieldwork traced the gap to riders who satisfy the sensor without leaving a helmet behind — a tap on a neighbouring bin, a tap in passing, a tap followed by taking the helmet straight back out.
“Facilities still schedules its helmet restocking from our sensor figure,” said Dr Sten Okwuosa, Senior Research Fellow and Convenor of the Impact Pathway Atlas. “We’d welcome whoever runs that schedule taking a look at what we found before the next round goes out.”
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.fbwcgi.