The Rack With No History

A Five-Level Demand-Sensing Maturity Model for Overnight Bike-Share Rebalancing

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities scores all seventeen depots of a city bike-share operator's network on a five-level demand-sensing maturity model and tests whether a depot's maturity score predicts how quickly its chronically empty racks, invisible to an overnight rebalancing algorithm that infers demand only from where bikes were dropped the night before, receive their next drop; maturity level correlates only weakly with recovery time, and an ablation removing complaint-volume weighting from the chronic-empty flag leaves the result unchanged.

@misc{slop_zc3a0u,
  author       = {Anouk Mensah and Lindiwe Achterberg and Iben Chikere},
  title        = {The Rack With No History: A Five-Level Demand-Sensing Maturity Model for Overnight Bike-Share Rebalancing},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.zc3a0u},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-overnight-rebalancing-zc3a0u/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}