I also wonder about a few more scenarios with these lockers:

- What if your balance runs out while your bike is in there? Do they keep it locked in there until you pay up or do they just deactivate the lock?
- What if there’s a power outage? Is your bike held hostage?
- Are they RFID based? Apparently, you can sniff and clone these signals right out of the air.

http://elocktech.com/

I spent 10 years living 2 miles from the Pleasant Hill BART station before I moved to SF. Ideal for biking to BART, but theft is a huge problem, so you can’t just leave your bike locked up outside the station or you’ll return to no seat etc. (echoing El Jeffe’s sentiments).

I was on the waiting list for a bike locker the whole time (**TEN** YEARS!). My slot never came up because the rent was so cheap that people who had lockers never bothered to give them up, even if they didn’t use them.

I park my bike at an East Bay station and leave it there overnight so I can avoid the no-bike-during-commute hours.

Twice my bike has been destroyed – either by thieves trying to steal it, or by drunken assholes taking out their anger on my bike.

I really wish the station I use would put these new bike lockers in, and here’s why: The old style lockers are for rent on a month-to-month basis – there is a waiting list that is over a year long for most of these older lockers. BART is extrememly bureaucratic when it comes to renting them, as well. Furthermore, I’ve not once seen anyone using the old-style lockers at my station – yet BART still says they’re all rented out.

Any way that would make the bike lockers easier to use would be fantastic in my book! These new lockers seem to be the perfect fix.

BTW: The station where my bike was twice plundered is DIRECTLY across the street from a BART police station. There are bikes stolen from the station on a weekly basis (as evidenced by the plethora of broken / cut bike lock debris lying around the racks). I’ve notified the BART police about this and they don’t give a flying fuck about bike theft.

BART has a policy of no bikes during commute hours — basically, no bikes when I need BART. So I cannot take my bike into the city and lock it up in the bike room of my building when I commute via BART. On a side note, I think this is closely related to their love of running short trains during commute hours as well.

Without the lockers, the only option is to lock the bikes in the “bike rack” area of the station, which is also the area the crackheads visit when they want to steal some bike parts. The nifty part of this arrangement is that BART also seems to have an official policy that the only thing station agents are supposed to watch for when bikes are concerned is that nobody ride the bike in the station. Crackheads stealing parts from bicycles in the middle of the day in full view of the station agent is A-OK!

So, when I ride my bike to the station and commute into the city on BART for work, I would much rather pay a few cents to lock up my bike securely all day long than to wonder what parts will be missing when I return in the evening.

ever locked your bike somewhere and returned to find all removable parts gone? it’s sad.

Five cents an hour is a great deal though, that’s $1.20 for a full 24 hours. Awesome.