Just tried Zagster for a test drive. Everything worked, but entering the lockbox code was not immediately successful. In bright sunlight, it's hard to see the keys light up. How about a beep or chirp when the keypad is ready to accept the code?

This morning I had some problems renting a Zagster bike. I signed up on Tuesday as part of the Yale University program. On Wednesday, I did a test drive with bike 132 at 60 College Street. Everything worked fine, although I had some problems with getting the lockbox to take the code (In bright sunlight, it’s hard to see that the keys are lit up. Couldn’t the thing beep?) I wanted to take a bike to a class I was teaching this morning on the other side of campus, because I needed to get back and forth quickly and bikes are faster than cars in downtown New Haven. I was all ready with my helmet on and there were 6 Zagster bikes to choose from. First I tried the one I had ridden Wednesday. I received “Sorry – Bike is not available”. I got the same message for bikes 141 and 156. An attempt to start bike 175 produced the following answer “Your message ‘start 175’ was not a valid command”. Same for bike 178. At this point I had to run to my parking lot and drive across town to my lecture, for which I was almost late. This was extremely annoying and indicates that the system is not reliable. I will not be recommending Zagster to my colleagues.

Sorry to hear about this. Did you make a new reservation for each day? The code resets at midnight every night. You need to make a new reservation every time you use a Zagster bike, and it will text you a new code for the bike you reserve.

I will forward this information to Zagster, and for future reference please send this kind of feedback directly to Zagster so that they can provide immediate guidance and fix any operational issues expeditiously.

Thank you!

According to the instructions and my experience on Wednesday, you don't need to make a reservation. You can just rent a bike texting 'start' plus the bike number to 1.202.999.3924, which is what I did. The web reservation system (an alternative to texting as described in the user info) is not very useful since you can reserve only for the current day, not in advance.

Apologies. I will get to the bottom of this first thing Monday.