ShareNow corner cases

Earlier this month, ShareNow announced a tiered pricing model where drives that left a car outside an inner "Zone A" would incur a $4.95 surcharge, and drives that brought cars back into Zone A would receive a credit of "up to" $4.95.

A spokesperson from ShareNow confirmed that the latter phrasing simply meant that the credit cannot exceed the actual cost of the trip. That is, a $3.00 ride from Zone B to Zone A would receive a credit of $3.

For many regular commuters between Zones A and B, then, this should turn out to be a wash. But the coarseness of this price signal has created some odd boundary conditions. A person that is a $3 ride away from a Link station in the boundary will continually incur $4.95 charges out and only $3 credits in.

These second-order details will get swamped by larger arguments about equity and economic sustainability, but I suspect they may also result in some unintended consequences. A simple tweak to the policy - limiting the surcharge to 100% of the cost of the trip - would remove this problem.