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Comment by vibragiel | Hacker News Reader

You just have to trust other cyclists. If you use a regular lock, anyone with another regular lock could lock your bike and screw you anyway.

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There's bike vandalism to watch out for, too. It's not very common, but few locks protect against it. Locks handle a much more common occurrence, that people want to steal a bike for material gain, not only for the detriment of the bike's owner.

Vandalism is just as common as theft in the Washington DC area. Usually if they can't break your lock, they break your bike instead.

DC has replaced some bike racks with bike lockers that totally enclose the bike. The downside is the lockers take up a lot of space so there are only a few of them at each metro station.

The thing is with that lock you have a stack, so the first bike on that pole can't get down until the others are gone. With regular locks problems happen only by mistake or by being an ass.

Putting your bike under someone else's is not being an ass?

1 bike -> 1 post. There isn't enough posts for all the bikes.

The stacking problem could be trivially solved by adding a small explosive charge that ejects your bike sideways when needed.

I guess it is, but it would be by using the lock as designed, rather than by being careless.

Either you have one bike per post, which is not efficient or enough, or you stack them.

So basically, though it's an interesting idea, this design is very impractical.

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