A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement classifies how long bikes actually stay locked to campus bike racks, finding long-stay bikes account for most of what Facilities' daily walkthrough photo counts as occupied by the deployment's end.
A 14-week bike-rack study finds long-stay, unmoved bikes account for most of what Facilities' daily photo counts as occupied
Facilities decides which campus bike racks get more room and which get pulled out using a single photograph, taken once a day, of every slot with a bike in it. A new research poster from the School of Continuous Improvement asked how much that one frame is really telling anyone.
Fourteen racks were logged every four hours for fourteen weeks, with each occupied slot classified by how long its bike had actually been there: gone within a day, back inside a week, or untouched longer than that. Long-stay bikes made up under a quarter of everything tagged at the outset, but by the study’s final weeks they accounted for most of the slots the daily photo was still recording as occupied; three of the four racks currently marked for expansion carried a long-stay share above the study’s own midpoint.
A photo taken once a day can’t ask a bike why it’s still there. Ours is the closest we’ve come to asking anyway.
— Dr Mirela Hanke, Postdoctoral Fellow, School of Continuous Improvement
Dr Renke Sabel, the poster’s co-author, said the walkthrough’s own count “isn’t wrong, exactly, it’s just answering a question nobody meant to ask it,” and that pairing the photo with a movement threshold was “the obvious next step before anyone spends money on more racks.”
The School counts the finding less as a verdict on the racks than as what it has learned about its own habit of trusting a single frame: precise, tidy, and blind to everything that happened between photographs.
The full poster is available from the University’s research repository under an open licence, doi:10.5555/slop.2dta56.