Raise the Hammer

You have to enter a personal password on the keypad built into the back of the bike (attached to your personal account) to unlock the bike & unlock the wheels. To allow you to bike on it. Once you do it, they know it's you who's riding the bike and the central computer system keeps track of where the bike went. It transmits your location while you ride it, so they know when the GPS signal disappears, and they can go to the location where the GPS signal disappeared (e.g. your front door).

The built-in solar rechargeable battery keeps the bike GPS alive for a long time, several days. The bikes have built-in bona-fide cellphone data transmitters (3G/LTE) that transmits data both ways, so it has real-time location awareness and remote control of the bike's speaker (I would gander that it can say custom messages too). If the bike moves without being unlocked first with a password, an alarm probably goes off.

This is explained in SoBi's Privacy Policy, which you agree to, when you become a member: https://app.socialbicycles.com/privacy Your location is tracked while riding a SoBi bike, but only to them.

Only unused bikes (bikes available for use) shows up on the public SoBi Map at https://hamilton.socialbicycles.com/#map When you park your SoBi bike, your bike shows up automatically again on this public map for the next SoBi member to take. If you park your bike in the backyard, somebody from the next street over, who's a SoBi member, may complain they can't access the bike. If you attempt to park the bike where there is no GPS signal, it triggers a check by the roving SoBi crews or alerts the bike's electronic speaker if it's in an invalid location.

Needless to say, it makes them very theft resistant. You literally can abandon them and thieves aren't interested in them. Makes it a very safe bikeshare system....nobody wants to steal your bike.

Comment edited by mdrejhon on 2015-07-06 17:58:29