Cold weather and bike reservations

I was inspired by Tom at Seattle Bike Blog's analysis of the fremont bridge bike frequency dataset to look at my own web traffic data for SMBR. Also inspired by the fact that it snowed yesterday, and that cold weather made a very clear showing in website traffic. Above I've displayed the (normalized) daily site visits in red and the daily temperature high (in degrees F) in blue for the last month 2/22 to 3/22.

The results were slightly surprising -- I had thought that some of those weird spikes, like the drop on 3/12, were due to cold weather. But that one, for example, was not due to a cold day. But the decline in traffic 3/21 and 3/22 is clearly due to declining temperature (and rain, which for some reason almanac.com was always placing at precip = 0 even though my memory tells me that that wasn't true. Need a better historical weather data source). The most clear finding looks like temperature swings are significant and my traffic model is like this -- there's some baseline level of traffic, but a much warmer day bumps it up and a much colder day bumps it down. Smaller temperature changes have no effect.

I hypothesized that website views are sensitive to change in temperature, not just temperature -- if it was 50 one day and then 56, folks suddenly start thinking about biking. So I made that plot (the first day doesn't have data because the n-1 point doesn't exist in this dataset). Here, at least in the later March data, I'm seeing a small day-shift in web traffic. A down-trend in weather forecasts a decrease in web traffic the next day, but only if that temperature decrease is sizeable. I'll be able to prepare more data like this when traffic picks up even more. Of course weather variability will decrease in the summer, so the temperature delta data won't be super interesting.

Case Study: Copenhagen

To understand the global bike rental market I'm going to start doing some case studies, beginning with Europe, because the market there is drastically different. Almost unintelligible to an American, really. Copenhagen and Amsterdam are the most bike friendly cities I've visited, both places where I rented a bike for some or all of my stay and didn't even think anything of it (at the time it didn't occur to me to ask why these affordable and convenient bike rental services don't exist in the US).

There are a few shops with upwards of a hundred bikes that show up in a google search, Baisikeli and cycleborsen are two of the top three (the third is Baisikeli with a different website). Prices start at $13 for a single day rental of a 24-speed bike. Thirteen US dollars. The cheapest rental in Seattle is $30, while a conveniently located one is $45.

I'll do a little table (doing a multi-gear bike in good shape, Baisikeli offers lower-end bikes that seem a bit risky, but are even cheaper):

Shop             Day Week   Month
Baisikeli       $19    $66     $139
cycleborsen   $13   $60     $138
Luca's            $8     ?         ?

These prices use currency conversion from xe.com on today's date 20130319.

Just to make this clear, a downtown Seattle rental shop charges $10 for one hour, $45 for a day, $175 for 5 days  -- lets say you could somehow finagle a week for $220. The day costs roughly 3 (2.3 to 3.5) times more than a day's bike rental in Copenhagen. The weekly rental in Seattle is more expensive than a month in Copenhagen -- it is roughly 3.3 times more expensive in Seattle.

Let's dispose of the first, most obvious explanation -- is Seattle somehow 3 times more expensive of a place to do business? No. Turns out consumer prices are 23% higher in general in Copenhagen (http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+States&city1=Seattle%2C+WA&country2=Denmark&city2=Copenhagen). This effect is opposite the observed price. Just to make this clear, a combo meal is about $12 in Copenhagen at McDonald's and $7 in Seattle.

As for other features of the rental experience, it looks like cycleborsen offers free bike delivery, while Baisikeli only does so for larger groups. A lock is generally included and it looks like a helmet is a slight extra fee (but note that in Denmark most people bike without a helmet, because of their good bike paths separated from cars, and their bicycle injury and fatality rates are actually lower than in the US). Cycleborsen's website is in Danish, and generally less user friendly, but neither one is a very modern website. From looking at the bikes these are slightly less good bikes than what you would get with a hybrid bike rental in Seattle for $45 (or from SMBR). The Baisikeli bikes mostly have 7 speeds, heavier frames, and coaster brakes (pedal backwards to stop). It looks like you would have to pay a bit more to get a better bike like what you would rent in Seattle, or from us. Judging by Yelp, an admittedly poor metric, it sounds like the renter experience is good at Baisikeli, so these are not low-quality enterprises.

One other note, the one biggest website, Baisikeli, is a not-for-profit. They rent standard and budget bikes and move bikes out to shops in Africa where they are donated to those in need of transportation. So they are not an incredibly profitable business, but they are certainly economically sustainable. The other shops seem to be for-profit businesses.

This copenhagen case study shows that bike rentals at $60-$70 per week are sustainable in a city with higher costs, especially labor cost (Denmark doesn't have a formal minimal wage, but $15 per hour is the minimum paid by most cleaning companies, so low end labor costs are very high by US standards). This should be possible in the US at the same rate -- and realistically, given a discount in labor cost and real estate in Seattle vs Copenhagen the prices should be more like 30% lower in the US. If a big mac meal is 40% cheaper here, why not a bike rental? It is very likely that insurance costs are higher here than in Denmark, so that may account for some of the difference, but without knowing the details of the Danish insurance market I can guarantee that that effect is likely less than 20% of the price difference.