Bixi Bankruptcy Delays Bay Area Bike Share Expansion Until Fall at Best

The expansion of Bay Area Bike Share into the Mission, the Castro, Hayes Valley, and Mission Bay planned for early this year won’t happen until fall at the soonest, due to the recent bankruptcy of Bixi, the company that supplies hardware and software for several American bike-share systems.

Heath Maddox, the SFMTA’s bike-share program manager, broke the news to an SF County Transportation Authority Board committee this week. He said the expansion would come in the fall “if everything went very well.”

“Our main technology and software provider is actually for sale,” said Maddox. “We should know what becomes of that sale later this month. Hopefully, it’ll be bought by our current operations and maintenance provider [Alta Bicycle Share], and they could just move, without a hitch, and once again fire up production.”

Maddox said after the sale and re-organization is completed, “it takes five to six months to produce the equipment once it’s ordered.”

In response, Supervisor John Avalos, the SFCTA Chair, said the expansion was supposed to have happened “yesterday,” and asked Maddox to “meet offline to talk more about it.”

The discussion took place after a presentation on the SFCTA’s “Strategic Analysis Report” on Bay Area Bike Share, which provided recommendations to guide the system’s expansion. One of those recommendations is to re-structure BABS’ administration to allow the SFMTA more independence to facilitate a swift expansion within San Francisco, which sees 90 percent of the system’s ridership.

The latest delay is one of too many to count for bike-share in SF. San Franciscans’ appetite for bike-share was first whetted in 2009, when even a tiny pilot of 50 bikes was dropped after Clear Channel backed out of a partnership with the city. Bay Area Bike Share was first promised in summer 2012 (though it didn’t have a name until May 2013), and was supposed to include 500 bikes and 50 stations in San Francisco, with the other half of the system in four cities along the Peninsula.

But only 35 of SF’s stations were put on the ground (and another 35 on the Peninsula), when the initial cost estimates proved to be too optimistic. The other 15 stations were promised within a few months. Now those stations (plus two more) will be coming in the fall, at the earliest.