Comments on: How to rent a bike without a credit card, DC edition

By: SomethingGre

SomethingGre — Wed, 11 Jan 2012 01:24:19 +0000

Please tell me there’s an option to purchase insurance so I don’t get hit $1,000.

Or better yet, incorporate the insurance with the membership.

By: vhanudux

vhanudux — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:19:03 +0000

It should be mentioned:
A: these bikes are very, very distinctive and very heavy, and are most likely of little resale value on the street.
B: Going along with that, they’re built like tanks – Disc brakes, internal hubs, thick frames. It’s not like it’s a Huffy you’d buy at Wal-Mart, they’re custom-built to take a beating.

So far, theft of Bikeshare bikes has been pretty low, so I think this is a positive move on their part.

By: Strych09

Strych09 — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 21:44:44 +0000

I don’t know much about the contemporary District, but were I live in the San Francisco Bay Area, transients and street people do brisk business in stealing bikes and then selling them any way they can in order to fund their ongoing addiction (usually marijuana, alcohol or crystal methamphetamine. So if this program didn’t have a way to require a substantial deposit, there’d be no way for it to be sustainable since the bikes would disappear in short order. Thus the stumbling blocks to “just” getting the unbanked on rental bikes.

And Eericsonjr, no one thinks that each bike in the program is actually worth $1k, that’s an amount that includes overhead and a ‘risk premium’ and to serve as a substantial motivator to the renter to return the bike.

By: Eericsonjr

Eericsonjr — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 20:35:45 +0000

$1,000? Bikes are $100-$200 items. Particularly in the city, where mild steel, fat tires and general frumpiness trumps spare Italian chromaloy beauty every time. If anyone wants to get the “unbanked” on bikes, start by dealing in this reality.

By: TGDC

TGDC — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 19:34:15 +0000

“Now, what’s more likely: that your credit card has $1,000 of spare capacity on it before it’s maxed out, or that your checking account contains $1,000 in cash? I’d say the former, by a substantial margin.”

True, but if the did sequentially smaller attempts on the debit card they could sweep whatever you do have in the account, and that may actually be more painful to the end consumer (and therefore still quite a deterrent) than a $1000 charge on their credit card.