Mini ethnography of BIXI
1Monday, November 26, 2012 by Unknown
I thought that since it's a relatively new
infrastructure BIXI would be an interesting case study.
Briefly, for those of you that might
not know: BIXI is a company that has bike renal locations around Toronto and
other large Canadian cities (https://toronto.bixi.com/).
They use a self-serve method of rental where you pick up a bike from one
location and return it to any of their other locations when you are done with
it.
Embeddedness: BIXI is embedded within a
number of other structures and arrangements. For example, the attitudes towards
bike travel in the city impact the number of people who use the system. Also,
the road and bike lane system both impact the ability of people to utilize the
service. .
Transparency: The system is designed to
be transparent and easy to use. You purchase a membership so that you don’t
have to pay every time and station locations are advertised throughout the city
as well as online. The mechanics of how the process of payment works becomes
secondary to the use of the system.
Reach or Scope: BIXI has both spatial
and temporal scope. The network extends throughout most of the downtown core,
and users are able (and encouraged) to make use of the service on multiple
occasions.
Learned as part of membership: One of
the reasons that I have personally never used the service is my unfamiliarity
with the locations of all the rental locations. It seems that once you have
learned the structure of the infrastructure you would be much better able to
estimate things like whether it would be appropriate for a particular trip, the
length and price of a particular rental, etc.
Embodiment of Standards: BIXI uses
other infrastructures such as Facebook and Twitter to share news, Google maps
to display online location information,
and credit card information for payments.
Built on an installed base: BIXI uses
the road system in Toronto, and many of its locations correspond to existing
transportation hubs such as TTC stops.
Becomes visible upon breakdown: The
payment options allowing you to borrow a
bike that are normally invisible would upon breakdown become visible. If you
could not pay for your rental, the bikes would remain locked and you would not
be able to use BIXI for your trip.
Is there any data on the availability of bikes in racks and slots at destination points?
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