It’s a bank, you fools

When I pick up my hire bike every day to cycle from New York’s East Village to our office in Soho, I’m struck by a great big missed opportunity.

All the blurb talks about the places where you pick up and leave your bike as ‘docking stations’, or maybe just ‘stations’. But the scheme is sponsored by Citi. Surely someone should’ve thought of calling them ‘bike banks’?!

Who knows, they could’ve even got me talking about ‘withdrawing’ and ‘depositing’ my bike, just to keep their services front of mind on a chilly New York morning. Barclays flunked it in London, too. Maybe if they’d inveigled their way into our psyches just a little more, they wouldn’t now be pulling out of their sponsorship.

(I’m still waiting for the banks to rename contactless payment, too.)