Follow-up: The Courthouse [Arlington] Capital Biksehare station, as best I can tell, was down for up to 48 hours in this outage. All Saturday and Sunday, April 10 & 11. Then it was back as normal by Monday and also reappeared on the app map and was back in service.
From what I can guess, at normal good-weather weekend usage, this high-traffic station going down means well over a hundred trips were potentially lost, some of whom could have used nearby stations but many (inexperienced etc users) not, and in all cases it means lost time.
Maybe related or maybe not: Starting about the same time and lasting up to yesterday, I noticed a few other stations have been “hiccuping,” by which I mean rejecting an attempted check-out of a bike (red light). The kiosk in these cases sometimes displays unusual things, often something like “station temporarily unavailable.” Not a good sign, but from past experience the solution is often to wait a minute or two and thing go back online. So far the “wait a minute” solution has worked each time.
Back in 2019 or so (there are threads here on the matter), there was a period of a few weeks with extensive ‘down’ periods. Entire areas had multiple stations down for hours or days at a time, a kind of “rolling blackouts” phenomenon they couldn’t figure out. Whatever ‘hiccups’ are in the system this time, it’s much less serious. The Courthouse CaBi Station going down for so long is the only serious problem I’ve noticed in April 2021 in this way.
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