Bikeep -"smart" commercial rack for safe bicycle parking

Bike thieves beware: This startup is using smart tech to reinvent cycle parking
("An Estonian firm's internet-connected racks are generating interest around the world."):
http://www.zdnet.com/article/bike-t...s-using-smart-tech-to-reinvent-cycle-parking/

Starts:

In 2013, a team of Estonian students and young entrepreneurs took part in the country's largest entrepreneurship-competition, called Brainhunt, with an idea to build a smart commercial rack for safe bicycle parking.

They reached the final and were voted the public's favorite. Soon, an initial test station was set up in the capital, Tallinn.

Four years later, the company they created, Bikeep, has installed over a thousand smart bike racks in Estonia, Ukraine, Hungary, Belarus, and most recently in the US. Bikeep has offices in Tallinn and from the last October also in San Francisco, where it expects to see the biggest growth in the near future.

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https://bikeep.com/

This is a cool idea. I particularly like the internet connectivity with video and alarm.

One thing I would like more of these endeavors to achieve is support from law enforcement. Working together with them, is how thieves will get caught with enough frequency that the 'job' becomes unsustainable due to poor return.

cal3thousand said:

This is a cool idea. I particularly like the internet connectivity with video and alarm.

One thing I would like more of these endeavors to achieve is support from law enforcement. Working together with them, is how thieves will get caught with enough frequency that the 'job' becomes unsustainable due to poor return.

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Alarm plus internet connectivity? Just more noise in the city, and more botnets for hackers to work with. The problem with bike theft isn't that our locks aren't good enough, it's that people lock up poorly and inconsistently, and that law enforcement people don't care about bikes. The former won't be fixed by a more sophisticated bike rack. Because of the latter, stolen bikes are more fungible than other stolen goods.

There just isn't a whole lot of downside to applying whatever technique is necessary to steal bikes, if you never face any punishment for doing it. The main disincentive against stealing bikes is that there just isn't very much money in it for the work it takes.

All the clever high security bike racks I've ever seen don't fit bikes of unusual size or shape. That's no good for me, but it's also no good for a lot of e-bikers.

Anybuddy notice? NO charge ports/somewhere to plug in chargers? [grumble grumble] Hehe

Bikeep has popped up again... The holy grail: a thief-proof bike rack?:
http://road.cc/content/news/224367-holy-grail-thief-proof-bike-rack

The writer concludes:

The cost of maintaining Bikeep racks is lot lower than maintaining the bike-share services, Lind added.

"Also, it's more convenient for the user, whose journey starts and ends at his or her front door, whereas with bike-share one has to go to the closest bike-share station first to get a bicycle and then get back home after returning it."

The company is now looking into added a charging system for electric bicycles.

"It hasn't been very popular among the customers yet, because the small number of electric bicycles," he says. "But we can see this trend changing and when it does, we already have a product for it."

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