Throughput is not really mentioned here, which is the key bottleneck I think. Nobody really has huge issues parking their bike at home. Humans are sufficiently

Throughput is not really mentioned here, which is the key bottleneck I think. Nobody really has huge issues parking their bike at home. Humans are sufficiently spread out around a city, and so bike density is similar to human density, which is not that bad. The problem areas for storage solutions for bikes is at areas with very high density. Here in the Netherlands that's the train stations. At the Central Station of big cities like Amsterdam or Rotterdam, hundreds of thousands of people pass every day, relatively small areas. Many of those arrive or leave by bike. Storing those bikes is tricky, not only because of space concerns, but also because the vast majority of people (probably 80%) arrive/leave during two periods of about 90 minutes of peek travel time in the morning and evening. In other words at any one point during those periods, you have hundreds of people storing or retrieving their bicycle at the same time. That is totally incompatible it seems with this device, which retrieves at most 2 bikes or so per minute. A person has to walk up, enter his card, his password, then the device has to do some stuff, then he has to retrieve it from the device, walk away. Compare storing your bicycle at a train station for example with buying train tickets. At the Central Station you'll easily find dozens and dozens of machines to buy a ticket, and lots of booths to do so as well, and still you see rows of people at peek times. Even after we've had subscription based tickets for decades (e.g. take any train and pay x per year) and card based systems (if the balance on your card drops below $10 it can get automatically refilled. Just swipe your card to enter the train) for years which means most travellers don't even need to purchase a ticket. So you'd need quite a lot of these machines and I don't really see how that'd make economic sense. We've had a lot of good experiences with manual underground, cheap, low-maintenance facilities now that are a better alternative. And for low-throughput areas, storage of bicycles isn't a very big issue, meaning the economics (premium price, no doubt) make even less sense when there are plenty of free storage opportunities (on the street). For certain bikes it makes sense (those costing $10k). But that's not the norm in countries with high per-capita rates of bikes. I and everyone I know have had bikes costing at most 200, I tend to buy them for 80 or so second hand with 20 of annual maintenance. I can store it infront of my house just fine, it's never a problem. The rate of theft means it's cheaper to buy a new one / insure the bike for a fraction of its cost, than to pay $100+ a year for storage like this (and even that rate is unlikely to be profitable for this facility). And at the central station where it is hard to park a bike without adequate facilities, retrieval would be too slow, and manual underground facilities are fine.