"Roland Perry" wrote:

In message , at 10:10:43 on
Fri, 12 Nov 2010, David Walters remarked:

The docking stations were unavailable on Sunday evening/night due
to a software update which might be linked to getting them ready for
casual users.

What were people returning bikes they hired earlier supposed to do during
this outage?


I strongly expect what David means is that just the 'pay station' terminals
were unavailable, so it wasn't a full outage - hence bikes could be returned
to the docking points, and indeed I think bikes can be taken out of the
docking points using a membership key even if the pay stations aren't
available (?). In the beginning there certainly seemed to be a problem with
the pay station terminals freezing or crashing (so some sort of software
problem) - I recall on the first weekend finding some that seemed to have
been in that frozen state all weekend.

The significant thing that the pay stations do offer to those with
membership keys is the ability to query what the status is of nearby docking
stations (how empty/full), and get the free extra 15 minutes added on if the
docking station one is at is full.