Ford buys Chariot, makes bike-sharing deal in alt-transport push

Chariot commuter vans wait to start their runs in the staging area at Divisadero and Chestnut streets in San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday, March 17, 2015. Chariot commuter vans wait to start their runs in the staging area at Divisadero and Chestnut streets in San Francisco, Calif. on Tuesday, March 17, 2015. Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Buy photo Photo: Paul Chinn, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 5 Caption Close Ford buys Chariot, makes bike-sharing deal in alt-transport push 1 / 5 Back to Gallery

Ford Motor Co. has seen the future — and it’s not just in cars.

“We want to change the way the world moves,” CEO Mark Fields said Friday outside San Francisco City Hall, announcing plans for bike-sharing and commuter shuttle services as Ford seeks to transform itself into a broader transportation company.

The century-old automaker will buy San Francisco shuttle startup Chariot and expand its services nationally and internationally. Ford also will team up with New York bike-sharing firm Motivate to bring its services to more cities throughout the Bay Area, with the goal of providing 7,000 bikes in the region by the end of 2018, up from the current 700. Riders will be able to access those bikes, as well as shuttles from Chariot, through an online service called FordPass.

“We’re taking a look at the whole ecosystem of moving people around,” Fields said in an interview Friday. “Cities are growing. They’re becoming more congested.”

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Ford will create a unit within the company, City Solutions, focused on working with cities to address transportation issues.

Chariot was already in business with Ford: It operates about 100 turquoise, 15-passenger shuttle vans, all Ford Transit Wagons, on 28 routes in San Francisco. It polls prospective riders on new routes and adds them when enough people register. The tipping point for a given route could be anywhere from 100 to 300 signups, said CEO and founder Ali Vahabzadeh.

The 2-year-old company, backed by $3 million in venture capital, gives thousands of rides a day at an average fare of $4, he said. About a fifth of riders use Chariot to complement public transit, going to or from BART, Caltrain or ferries, for instance. While it’s experienced healthy growth, the Ford deal will vault it to a new level, Vahabzadeh said.

Ford wants to take Chariot global, expanding to five more cities — one of them outside the United States — in the next 18 months. Company officials declined to identify the cities under consideration or reveal the price of the Chariot acquisition.

By contrast, Ford is thinking more locally in its deal with Motivate, which runs bike-share programs in 10 U.S. cities plus Melbourne and Toronto. It will vastly expand the program in San Francisco and neighboring towns.

“Unlike traditional transit, which measures time in decades, (bike-sharing) growth can literally be measured in months,” said Motivate CEO Jay Walder, who previously ran mass transit systems in New York, Hong Kong and London. “We want to make bike sharing ubiquitous in every part of the city. We can pop up almost instantly out of nowhere.”

Three Bay Area mayors, along with the chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, appeared at the event to underscore the bike program’s regional nature.

“We’re going to see bikes reproducing like bunnies all over the Bay Area,” said San Jose Mayor Sam Liccardo, who was joined by mayors Ed Lee of San Francisco and Tom Bates of Berkeley. “We embrace Silicon Valley, but sometimes the old technologies are the best.”

Motivate’s seven-speed street bikes, rented in half-hour increments, aren’t designed for long hauls or recreational use. Instead they are strictly a Point A to Point B system, said Cynthia Armour, advocacy manager of Bike East Bay. Her group will reach out to lower-income residents to tout the program, which will be discounted for people who have subsidized utilities.

The moves come as Ford and its competitors brace for major changes that could soon revolutionize transportation.

Last month, Ford committed to selling self-driving taxis within five years, as autonomous driving technology rapidly advances. Other automakers have similar plans, and are forming alliances with such ride-hailing services as Uber and Lyft.

It is a far different landscape from decades ago, when automakers bought up mass-transit systems but then closed them down, ensuring the primacy of the automobile. Ford sees bike sharing and shuttles as complements to urban mass-transit systems, not competition, said Jim Hackett, chairman of Ford Smart Mobility, a subsidiary of the automaker that’s focused on alternate transportation systems.

“Think of it as a system,” said Hackett. “These are different pieces that complement each other. Mass transit has a clear, important role where you have clear points of pick up and large numbers of people. Shuttles are a different strategy.”

Ford could eventually bring its self-driving technology to Chariot’s shuttles, Hackett said.

“In the future, the world’s our oyster in terms of what we might be able to do with that capability,” he said. “It really opens a fresh view of the way people will be transported in the future.”