The big expansion of the Bay Area bike share program gets under way this month, and while the number of bikes and docking stations will be growing, so will the price.

The program will expand from two cities (San Francisco and San Jose) with a total of 470 bikes remaining from the original 700, to five cities (adding Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville) with 7,000 bikes by the end of next year.

Designed for short trips, users can unlock a bike from one docking station and return it to another. The cost of an undiscounted annual membership will rise to $149 from $88, but the service area will be much larger and riders can keep a bike for 15 minutes longer before racking up overtime fees.

Motivate, the Brooklyn company that is operating the program under a 10-year contract with the Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, began removing the old aqua bikes and docking stations from San Francisco and San Jose on Sunday. They will start installing new blue bikes and stations this week, although the system will not become operational until June 28. East Bay service will begin July 11.

Back to Gallery Bay Area bike share expansion gets rolling 5 1 of 5 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 2 of 5 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 3 of 5 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 4 of 5 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle 5 of 5 Photo: Michael Short, Special to The Chronicle









The new bikes, and the program itself, will be rebranded Ford GoBike after the primary sponsor, Ford Motor Co.

Under the old program, users could buy a membership for one day ($9), three days ($22) or one year ($88). That entitled them to an unlimited number of 30-minute trips within the membership period before racking up overtime charges of up to $7 per half hour.

Under the new program, users can buy a single trip of up to 30 minutes for $3 or a one-day pass for $15, good for an unlimited number of rides of up to three hours over a 24-hour period. The annual membership fee of $149 ($124 if purchased before June 28) is good for an unlimited number of 45-minute rides. Overtime fees will be $3 for each 15 minutes.

A membership for low-income users will cost $5 for the member’s first year and $5 per month thereafter.

In the past, users registered their payment information and got a key fob that unlocked the bikes. In the future, they will use a mobile app or Clipper card to unlock them. They cannot use a Clipper card to pay fees; instead, they must have a credit or debit card, although low-income members can pay in cash at select locations.

Motivate spokeswoman Dani Simons said the price increase is necessary because “the program is growing tenfold in size,” giving users “greater utility.” Also, Motivate wants to be able to pay its employees “a living wage.”

Motivate operates bike-share programs in nine metro areas. All have lower fees except New York and Jersey City, where the annual membership is $163 for unlimited 45-minute rides. In Chattanooga, Tenn., the annual fee is just $50 for unlimited 60-minute rides.

Simons explained that some cities subsidize the program. New York and the Bay Area do not.

“The agreement is structured so that taxpayers are paying almost zero in terms of operation, capital, bikes and stations,” said Kara Oberg, a Metropolitan Transportation Commission planner.

Eric Pierson, a 48-year-old retiree, uses bike share every day to get to the Ferry Building, where he skateboards. He’s not too concerned about the price increase. “It is what it is. Everything’s going up. It’s the city.” He said the extra 15 minutes is nice “because some people ride slower than others.”

Under a revenue-sharing agreement, the MTC will get 5 percent of annual sponsorship revenue that exceeds $7 million a year and 5 percent of ridership revenue over $18 million a year. The MTC will keep 20 percent of any revenue it receives and divide the rest between the five cities based on each city’s stations and ridership. “MTC and the cities are not in this to produce revenue,” Oberg said.

Ford is reportedly paying $49 million over seven years for advertising and naming rights. Motivate is seeking secondary sponsors to advertise on station panels and the mobile app. Motivate can defer payment of any sponsorship revenues owed to the MTC in years one through five until years six through 10.

Heath Maddox, a senior planner with the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, said, “I don’t expect we’ll make anything because the hurdles are quite high.”

Some criticisms of the old program were that it was too small to achieve critical mass (Palo Alto, Redwood City and Mountain View were dropped from the initial program because too few peple used the bikes) and that the price was too high for 30-minute rides. That left a void some competitors tried to fill.

Early this year, Bluegogo attempted to set up service in San Francisco, but the city effectively shut it down, at least temporarily. The Chinese company operates stationless bike sharing. Instead of docking bikes in stations, they can be parked almost anywhere. The lock and tracking technology are on the bike; users find and pay for them with a mobile app. It’s cheaper to operate than traditional bike sharing, because you don’t need people to redistribute bikes to make sure each station has an adequate supply. But in China, companies have dumped so many stationless bikes on streets and sidewalks it’s creating a backlash.

The Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance in March making it illegal to leave stationless bikes on city streets, sidewalks or rights of way without a permit. So Bluegogo began operating out of private parking lots — charging users just 99 cents for every 30 minutes, with no membership required. But the city continued to object, saying the company failed to get a permit to operate a business on private lots.

Bluegogo removed the bikes from city streets in late March while it works with the city to establish a presence here, a company spokeswoman said. The bikes are being stored in a warehouse “preparing for launch this summer.”

Maddox said his agency has the legal authority to issue permits for stationless bike sharing, but hasn’t yet developed the permit application.

In San Mateo, Social Bicycles is operating a stationless program. Users are supposed to park bikes in one of the company’s racks or, for a $3 fee, in a public rack. The San Mateo City Council voted in May to expand the year-old program to 100 from 50 bikes. The cost is $5 per hour or $15 per month, which includes one hour of ride time per day. The New York company plans to establish an electric-bike-sharing system somewhere in the Bay Area this summer.

What Ford hopes to get out of bike sharing, other than branding, is not entirely clear. During an investor conference in September, Jim Hackett — who at the time was chairman of Ford Smart Mobility and is now the automaker’s CEO — talked about Ford GoBike and Chariot, the San Francisco shuttle service that Ford bought last year. Chariot crowdsources its routes and stops, using data from users’ smartphone apps.

“What we are doing differently in San Francisco that isn’t done in New York is we put telemetry on that bike; telemetry is a form of communication,” Hackett said, according to a transcript. “So now the bike is pinging data to us. Listen, here is the deal — the opportunity is not bikes. That is not why Ford is in it. The opportunity is data. And the data is super valuable because it tells us these invisible paths that people are taking in this complex city in terms of how they want to get around. And there is something else cool about it, because we can take that data and we can connect it in ways that our new shuttle is going to connect to the cloud as well.”

I asked Ford and Motivate if that means the new bikes will be collecting personal data about users’ whereabouts that could be used or sold. In an email, Ford spokeswoman Angie Kozleski said, “at the upcoming launch, the bikes do not include technology that collects real-time data (i.e. weather conditions and bike availability) but the potential remains. That said, we believe that cities can derive tremendous value in insights that could come from capturing data from many forms of transportation system.”

Simons said Motivate is not putting telemetry on the bikes, but by the end of the year, it expects to have location-based services on the app, which will give users data about their mileage traveled and calories burned. Users can turn the service off, like they can with any app.

For a map of planned station locations, go to https://member.fordgobike.com/map.

Kathleen Pender is a San Francisco Chronicle columnist. Email: kpender@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @kathpender

Pump it up

Approximate number of bikes available before and after expansion of Bay Area bike sharing program

City Last week End of 2017 End of 2018 San Francisco 350 1,750 4,500 San Jose 120 400 1,000 Oakland, Berkeley, Emeryville 0 1,500 1,500 Total 470 3,650 7,000

Source: Motivate