Princeton Students Cheat the New Zagster Bike Share System

Photo courtesy of Morgan Kelly, Office of Communications

Last month, Princeton introduced Zagster, a bike sharing system that allows students to rent and return a bike from any station on campus for up to two hours. Though the University has not encountered any serious problems with the operation yet, there is word of students breaking the rules slyly.Princeton first became involved with Zagster in fall of 2014 when the University acquired 10 rental bikes for visitors to rent from the Transportation Hub, which includes the Dinky and buses near Wawa. This small bike share program was a success, so Princeton decided to expand Zagster to the Princeton campus.Renting a Zagster bike is simple: users pay a one-time membership fee of $20, which allows them access to bikes whenever they want. Each bike has a code, which the user enters into the app. The app then displays a code that users enter on the bike keypad to get a key for the bike lock, which can be used for two hours. For every extra hour a user doesn’t return the bike, Zagster charges $2.But two hours isn’t very much time, and at least one student has figured out a way to get around Zagster’s time limit.The student who asked to remain anonymous learned from his cousin at Yale how to essentially keep a bike for an unlimited amount of time without being charged any fees.After requesting a ride, he would take a bike from a Zagster station and cancel the ride on the app before the two hours were up. Then, he would re-request another ride using the same code in order to keep the same bike. This way, he was able to keep one bike for the entire day without ever returning it to a station or paying the fee.“A $20 down payment is pretty simple, but the issue is that only having two hours to get the bike back to a station is very tough, especially for someone like me who will have three classes in a row around mid-day, so there’s no time to take the bike and put it back in the station,” he said.He continued doing this until Zagster realized what he was doing and suspended him from the app. They later agreed to let him continue renting bikes if he agreed to stop cancelling and re-requesting rides.Kim Jackson, director of Transportation & Parking Services, said that the only major problem the University has run into so far was an unlocked bike found outside Spellman. After someone reported the abandoned bike, Jackson notified Zagster and the bike was given a new lock.Apart from this instance and the possible worry that students might abandon other bikes in the future, the bike sharing program has so far been successful.“If there has been something, the Zagster people have figured it out and figured out ways to stop some of that from happening because it’s in everybody’s best interest to do that,” Jackson said.But she added that because students here are “super smart and creative,” it’s just a matter of time to see if someone will try to beat the system again.