Today I used the bike link lockers for the first time. I wasn’t previously planning to use them, so I didn’t have a dedicated card. I was a bit worried of running out of battery and my bike getting trapped, and the reviews of the app were not great, so I ruled it out. So this left me adding it to my clipper card from my phone while standing outside the bike link lockers by salesforce park.

My overall review

Pros:

• My bike didn’t get stolen and I think it probably wouldn’t be
• it’s 5 cents an hour

Cons:

• Everything else
• Getting it to work with your clipper card is the most confusing process I’ve encountered on a computer that wasn’t running Linux
• Only a very narrow set of bikes will fit, and I mean narrow both literally and metaphorically
• There are very few clipper-compatible lockers, so you are basically parking your bike in one place downtown and walking everywhere else downtown, I guess this is how cars work though, but I’m used to parking my bike within half a block of wherever I’m going
• Many of the lockers gave me cryptic error messages and may have been out of service

Getting it to work with the clipper card

I really wish I’d taken more photos of this part.

It starts out fairly straightforward. You have to make an account, it asks for a fair bit of information including the last 4 digits of your photo ID, which is a bit odd. I think you need photo ID to access the shared lockers, but you can’t use a clipper card for that anyway (except maybe at BART?). You link it to your clipper card (I didn’t see any verification that you own the clipper card, but I guess that doesn’t matter, because this is an additional pool of money.) You load on $5, from which 5 cents are deducted per hour, and I don’t see myself ever using all $5. It feels almost like they want your credit card so they can charge you if you break something. You do text verification with your phone number. Mostly pretty standard stuff.

Then you try to open the locker.

The first few I tried, I got “connection error”. Eventually I got one that said that my clipper card needs to be synced. I don’t remember where I assembled the various instructions from, but I figured out how to open it through trial and error. Here’s what you do the first time:

1. Hold down your clipper card on the reader on the top continuously. It says to hold it down for 5 seconds, but that alone isn’t enough:
2. Find the small metal button and hold it down until you enter some kind of debug menu. At this point you will be worried that you broke the thing, because it looks like there is no way you are supposed to be seeing all this diagnostic information. It’s fine. Keep holding the button.
3. At some point, the screen will show information about your clipper card, which doesn’t seem like it’s supposed to be user facing. Keep holding the button and keeping the clipper card in place.
4. At some point it will tell you to come back in 2-5 minutes, so wander around the base of Salesforce Park for a bit, wondering if any of those empty storefronts will ever get rented out while the security guard stares at you suspiciously.
5. Come back and open the door. It should work. It will beep at you to close the door the entire time it’s open, in a way that makes it seem like you’re doing something incorretly.

Storing your bike

My bike, which is a pretty normal bike with a basket, does not fit in facing forward. You might think you have the entire box, but they’re divided on the inside into triangles. These triangles get really narrow at the end. It barely fit when I put it in backwards and turned the front wheel sideways.

This will not work with cargo bikes, or any non-standard bike-like vehicle with more than 2 wheels or any width to it at all. Or length, for that matter. It definitely was intended to be used with standard bikes with no attachments or folding bikes. It probably won’t work if you have both a front basket and anything stored on the back. They tell you that you can only store your bike + reasonable accessories but there is no way you’re fitting anything else in there.

If you put stuff away, and then realize you want to put more things away (e.g. you forgot to put your helmet away), you can’t just open it mid-storage, you have to end your storage period. It didn’t charge me for the <5 minutes that I’d stored it there, at least. However, it locked me out of re-locking the bike for about a minute, telling me I can only rent one locker at once. After a minute or two it let me rent it again.

Make a note of which one your bike is in, because while the boxes are transparent, they aren’t that transparent and I had a moment of panic about finding my bike.

Thoughts

This solves one very specific problems for me: I have a bike, I don’t have a lot of stuff, and I want to be away from my bike for a protracted period of time and am worried about parking it on the street. For instance, I’m going to the SFMOMA, or to see a movie at the Metreon. I probably wouldn’t bother if I was getting dinner or something. Or going to the ferry building or anywhere with foot traffic.

The process is complicated enough that it seems unlikely that casual bike users would use it, but the people willing to go through a complicated system to use it, or to plan in advance and get a dedicated card, seem a lot more likely to have a non-standard bike that won’t fit. The clipper-compatible bike boxes are not in a place you’re likely to notice them if you aren’t looking for them. It seems like very much a missed opportunity.

You can store a bike for up to 7 days. I’m not sure what the use there would be. I guess you could park your bike there, take the Amtrak bus to Emeryville, and go for a little trip on Amtrak?

It would be kind of nice to have it other places, right now it seems kind of limited, at least in San Francisco. I don’t know how I feel about the group parking at Civic Center BART - the Civic Center would be an area that I’d particularly like to have a bike locker. Mission could be good for some people - I’m pretty comfortable parking my bike in the Mission.

It seems like it reaches as far as Santa Rosa or Sacramento, so if I took a trip there and was worried about bringing it into the hotel for any reason that would be an option. (I’ve never had a hotel tell me I can’t, but I’ve encountered some very small elevators.)

Likewise they also have it in Seattle and Portland, though obviously not with Clipper cards.