Introduction and Goals

CityCycle lets residents and visitors of Riverside rent a bike from a docked station, ride it, and return it to any CityCycle station. The first release covers mechanical bikes only. Electric bikes arrive later (see RFC 0001).

Requirements Overview

• A rider finds a nearby station with available bikes, unlocks one with the mobile app, rides, and docks it at any station with a free slot.
• Billing is per trip, charged at the end of the ride through a payment provider.
• Operators see station fill levels and receive alerts when a station is nearly empty or nearly full, so they can redistribute bikes.
• Support staff can look up a trip and refund or close it when something goes wrong.

Out of scope for the first release: free-floating bikes, reservations more than a few minutes ahead, multi-city roaming, and operator white-labeling.

Quality Goals

Priority	Quality goal	Scenario
1	Availability of unlock	A rider who is next to a station with a free bike can unlock it in under 3 seconds at the 95th percentile during weekday morning peaks.
2	Station data freshness	The map of nearby stations shows bike and slot counts that are at most 30 seconds behind the last dock or unlock event.
3	Operability for redistribution	An operator can open a live view of all stations and filter stations that need restocking within one screen load (under 2 seconds for the city-wide list).

Integrity of billing (no lost trips, no double charges) is a hard constraint, not a quality goal we trade away. It appears under architecture constraints.

Stakeholders

Role/Name	Contact	Expectations
City transport office	product owner	Reliable service during peaks; clear reporting of usage
Riders	end users	Fast unlock, trustworthy map of free bikes
Fleet operators	operations team	Live station fill levels and alerts
Support	customer care	Trip lookup and refund without engineering help
Engineering	CityCycle team	A system that can add electric bikes without a rewrite