12. Shared-cost support models — what actually prices the shared van
Full detail in the Aggregators And Shared-Cost Support Models chapter and the
chapters that follow it.
The structural finding
The operational model being proposed already exists everywhere in the world — but it
is always sold as luggage transfer, never as rescue. The van is real, it
circulates all day, it serves many unrelated customers, and it is a mature competitive
market. What nobody sells is a guaranteed, priced, dispatchable rider-and-bike
pickup. Where rescue exists it is a free, informal, best-efforts courtesy bolted onto
bike hire — "give us a ring" — with no response-time promise published by any
operator, in any sector, anywhere.
Six numbers that price the shared van
| Number | Source | What it proves |
|---|---|---|
| £35/bag/day at one bag, £18 at two | Brigantes, Coast to Coast | A 49% unit-cost drop from sharing, published on a public price list. The clearest proof of the thesis found anywhere |
| A$450pp at 2 guests → A$250pp at 6–10 | Escapegoat Adventures, McLaren Vale | The same curve, in Australia, in a wine region, with a van that already collects wine — but locked to one private group at a time |
| A$175pp self-guided, no van | Escapegoat, same operator, same terrain | ⚠️ |
| Caminofácil | ⚠️ |
|
| $150/hr for 5 seats → $275/hr for 24 | Mountain Bike Rotorua charter table | Going from 5 to 24 seats cuts cost per rider 62% while total vehicle cost rises only 83%. Vehicle size is the biggest lever in the model |
| $3.89–4.00 per rider wholesale vs $50–100 retail | IRRC organiser fee schedule vs UNBOUND Gravel "Crew For Hire" | A ~13–26× spread between what shared rescue costs and what riders pay for it — but only at event-scale density. (The stated range endpoints give 12.5×–25.7×; the original "13–22×" did not compute.) |
⚠️ Two of the six numbers above have been withdrawn on audit (the Escapegoat
pair and the Caminofácil pair). The Brigantes £35/£18 row also does not mean what
it says: Brigantes prices 1 bag vs 2+ bags within a single booking — a
couple with two bags, not two unrelated parties. It evidences a per-order volume
discount, exactly like Caminofácil's, not strangers sharing a van.What survives as genuine evidence for the pooling thesis is the Mountain Bike
Rotorua charter table — a published curve across vehicle sizes — plus the IRRC
wholesale-vs-retail spread at event density. That is two datapoints, not six.And the counter-evidence deserves equal billing: the Shared-cost support — the
Camino, the UK paths chapter records Sherpa Van pricing the Pennine Way "by
remoteness rather than distance" — £40 vs £20 on adjacent segments of a single
trail with one demand profile. A 2× swing with zero load-factor variation.
If most of the cost is distance, driver-hours and fuel, it does not shrink as the
van fills — which is the opposite of the thesis. See the Audit of the aggregator
and shared-support research chapter.
And the number that constrains the pricing
RACV Bike Assist: A$47 a year, unlimited callouts, e-bikes included, rider and bike
both transported, and the covered triggers explicitly include punctures, fatigue,
dehydration and severe weather. Victoria only, no response-time guarantee, taxi capped
at A$50 per trip.
A Victorian customer can already buy unlimited bike rescue — for exactly the failure
modes this product proposes to cover — for about a quarter of one day ticket. The
van's defensible value is therefore not rescue. It is wine collection, gear
carriage, presence, and the confidence that lets a mixed-ability group ride at all.
Rescue is the reassurance that makes those bookable, not the product.International equivalents: ETA Cycle Rescue £24/yr (UK, unlimited callouts,
e-bike flat batteries covered), Better World Club US$44.95/yr (only 2 calls/year,
30-mile limit), ADFC €66/yr (Germany, 240,000+ members, 120-minute repair window).
The white space, stated precisely
[NOT FOUND] anywhere in the world: a day pass, a trail-support subscription, or a
season pass covering shuttle and rescue across many independent cycling customers.
Checked directly in France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Germany, Austria, New Zealand,
Canada, South Africa, the UK and the USA.
⚠️ CORRECTED — this contradicts the "how support is actually delivered" chapter of
this same synthesis. See S-6 in the 7. Cross-file consistency audit chapter.
[NOT FOUND] anywhere in the world: a single published response-time commitment.
At least two published response commitments exist, both named in that earlier
chapter:
- ADFC Pannenhilfe (Germany) — mobile repair "within a maximum of 120
minutes", at national scale, 240,000+ members. - Discover France — "back on the road within an hour".
Add the adjacent hard time-windows this corpus also documents: Correos delivers
Camino bags "before 14:30", Trail Journeys delivers 11:00–16:00,
Travel-Lite collects "by 9:00am".
The true finding is narrower: no operator publishes a response-time commitment for
on-route rider rescue in a wine region. The anti-promises are real and worth
keeping — Michigan Coast to Coast tells riders on its $100 rescue tier "you may have
to wait quite a while to be picked up", and RAGBRAI's hailing protocol is "turn
your bike upside down ('wheels up') on the left side of the road".
A guaranteed response window is genuine, uncontested white space— it is
not uncontested; ADFC has run one at national scale for years. What is uncontested
is a 20-minute window for on-route wine-region rescue.This document also argues both sides of it. The next chapter's second ranked
idea recommends copying ADFC's promise "word for word" and calls 20 minutes
"six times better" than the proven standard — while this section calls the same
sentence the riskiest the business could print. Both cannot be the recommendation.
Resolve before any marketing copy is written.The surviving caution stands, and is the safer reading: treat "the van is never
more than twenty minutes away" as the riskiest sentence the business could print,
and make sure the ride-and-drive test earns it before the marketing uses it. Note
that ADFC — the only operator proven at scale — promises 120 minutes, six times
looser, with a national fleet behind it.
One more mechanic worth naming: sell frequency, not seats
Across ~45 MTB shuttle and event operators, capacity appears in exactly four places.
Everyone else markets dispatch rate: "up to 5 vans running up the hill" (Up Down
Around, Derby), "continuous uplift 10–4" (Dyfi), "every 30 minutes" (Yuba
Expeditions). The product being sold is wait time, not a seat — which is also why
the industry publishes no seat counts.
What the regional sweeps established on their own
The one true precedent is not in tourism at all: ADFC Pannenhilfe — €66/yr, 240,000+
members, a 24/7 hotline, mobile repair up to €20 within a maximum of 120 minutes, and
transport of rider and bike home or to a workshop if it cannot be fixed roadside.
Their own rationale: "solidarisch alle Mitglieder bekommen den Basisschutz. Dadurch
ist der Preis pro Mitgliedschaft entsprechend gering."
Six adjacent mechanics were found, and all six are copyable:
- Per-stage batching grids. BicyBAGS (France): 1–2 bags €70 → 8 bags €135 on the
same stage. Les Vélos Verts: Orléans–Angers €35 (1 bag) → €120 (10 bags). - Volume discounts on a van run. Détours de Loire bike repatriation: −25% at
4 bikes, −50% at 8. - Per-movement, not per-person, pricing. Trail Journeys: NZ$45 per movement,
with a 9am cut-off and an 11am–4pm delivery window. The customer's flexibility is
what pays for the shared vehicle. - A seat minimum that pools unrelated customers. Hoodoo: "Daily shuttles require
a minimum of 4 people." Slow Days: guided runs only at 6 total participants, with
a downgrade to the self-guided version at an adjusted price rather than a
cancellation if the minimum is missed. - Seat-filling built into the quote engine. Girolibero: transfers "in taxi or
other private vehicle and the cost is advantageous if you fill all the seats."
BicyBAGS: Royan–La Rochelle €270 total = €67.50pp at 4, €45pp at 6. - ⚠️
Route rotation to keep one vehicle busy. Vine Hopper runs three different
Stellenbosch routes on different days of the week — one vehicle, three
products.
WITHDRAWN — the "one vehicle" reading is wrong. Vine Hopper's own route pages
list 5–6 departures per day (Northern 09:45, 11:10, 12:30, 13:40, 14:50,
16:00; Southern 08:45, 10:00, 11:15, 12:30, 13:45). That is a repeating
same-day circuit, almost certainly on more than one vehicle — not one van
rotated across three products by weekday. The route rotation is real; the asset
efficiency inferred from it is not. See D-4 in the Audit of the New World
research chapter.
And the biggest scale proof that a shared people-and-bags van can be a standalone
business: La Malle Postale, France — over 1.2 million bags since 2009, moving
luggage, bikes and people, with scheduled shuttles between trailheads, 7 days a week
in season.