Nobody Called the Insurance Guy

The dock near my dentist's office has been empty for weeks, and the little screen keeps telling me it is ready to ride. It is not ready to ride. It's a row of metal mouths with nothing in them, standing in the sun like a parking lot for ghosts. A guy in a lanyard tapped his phone against it twice on Tuesday, looked at me as if I ran the thing, and said, "Is it broken or is it just Austin?"

Reader, I did not have the heart to tell him those are the same department.

Here's what actually happened, according to KUT. In May, a fire hit the charging facility for the bikeshare system and destroyed about $159,000 worth of equipment. That equipment was not insured. Service is supposed to come back in stages starting August 11.

That's the news. Everything after this is a man on a porch with opinions.

A city of self-insurers

I want to be clear that I am not shocked a public bikeshare program had no coverage on its gear. I'm shocked anyone expected otherwise. This is a town where several generations treated "insurance" as something you got after the second time.

My first real bike was a red Schwinn from a garage sale in Hyde Park, priced at fifteen dollars and haggled down to eleven by a kid with no leverage and a lot of nerve. I locked it outside a record store on Guadalupe with a cable lock you could have opened with a strong opinion. Two hours later it was gone and I had a lock, a receipt for a cassette, and a lesson. I did not file a claim. I walked home up Duval and told my mother the bike had "moved on."

That's self-insurance in Austin. You pay the premium in shoe leather and the deductible in pride.

A partial schedule of my uninsured losses

Since the city is now officially in the club, here's what membership has looked like over a lifetime. None of these were covered. All of them were total losses.

• One red Schwinn, 1980s, Guadalupe. Replacement value: eleven dollars and my innocence.
• One Igloo cooler, left on a tailgate on East Sixth after a show. It had two Shiner Bocks and a block of ice in it. Somebody had a better night than I did.
• One rear bike wheel, removed with surgical precision while the rest of the bike stayed chained to a rack on campus. Whoever did it had a quick-release philosophy and no shame.
• One folding lawn chair, the good kind with the woven plastic straps, lost at an outdoor show to a guy who was "just borrowing it for the set." The set ended in roughly 1996.
• One U-lock key, dropped into a storm drain on Lamar. The lock is presumably still down there, protecting nothing, out of habit.

Grand total, adjusted for sentiment: maybe a couple hundred bucks. The city lost about $159,000 in one go. I've been doing this for decades and I never once managed to lose a six-figure amount. That takes institutional muscle.

When I do it, it's being broke. When they do it, it's a "policy question."

This is where the grouching gets serious, because there's a real difference between me and a public transit system.

When a guy with a bike doesn't insure it, that's a personal decision made at a kitchen table between rent and groceries. When a public program runs a fleet of electric bikes, plugs them all in at one facility, and doesn't cover the equipment, that's a decision too. It's just made at a much bigger table, by people with much better chairs, and it ends up on everybody's tab.

I don't know exactly who decided what, or when, or whether some binder somewhere says "fire: we'll cross that bridge." The reporting says the stuff was uninsured. That's enough to raise an eyebrow without inventing a villain. But I'll say this: if you're going to put all your e-bike batteries in one room, that room is a strong candidate for a policy.

I spent my twenties keeping everything I owned in one apartment, too. That's why I own nothing from my twenties.

On "staged" reopenings

Service resumes in stages starting August 11, and I'll admit "in stages" made me laugh. Austin loves a staged rollout. We stage everything. Highway expansions, rail plans, the gradual return of affordable rent (still in stage zero, pending review).

I'm picturing the bikes coming back like an old band on a reunion tour. First a few stations. Then a few more. Eventually the full lineup, minus whatever didn't make it out of the charging room. Somebody will post a photo of the first bike back in a dock like it's a sea turtle returning to the beach, and honestly, I'll probably share it.

Because here's my problem. I like the bikeshare.

The confession

I grew up in a version of this town where getting around on two wheels was a kind of folk religion. Community bikes painted bright colors showed up in the late nineties, got ridden, got lost, got repainted, and got passed around like a casserole dish nobody remembered owning. Half of them had a seat that spun. All of them had character. None of them were insured either, but nobody pretended they were an asset class.

The modern system is a slicker, appified descendant of that idea. You tap a phone, a dock beeps, you roll away on a bike with a little motor that makes the hill on Twelfth feel like an apology. I've ridden them from downtown to a taco truck I won't name because it's the only one left that hasn't put "artisanal" on a chalkboard. I've docked one with ninety seconds to spare and felt like I'd landed a plane.

So when the docks went empty this summer, it wasn't a tragedy. Nobody got hurt in this story, and that's the part that matters most. But it was one more small, cheap, useful thing that just quietly wasn't there, in a summer when the bus stops have no shade and the sidewalks have no trees and the rent has no ceiling.

We didn't lose bikes so much as lose a reason to leave the truck at home.

A modest proposal for the next binder

I'm not asking for a revolution. I'm asking for a sticky note.

Whoever manages the fleet once it's rebuilt, please put a Post-it on the monitor that says Did we insure the stuff that charges in one room? Check it once a year. Maybe twice in August, when this city turns every room into the charging facility.

And to the guy in the lanyard at my dentist's dock: it wasn't broken, and it wasn't just Austin. It was a fire, a gap in coverage, and a slow staged comeback. Which, now that I write it down, is about as Austin as it gets.

See you on the 11th, or whichever stage reaches my end of town. I'll bring my own lock. Old habits.