Bay Area Bike Share program about to begin

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After years of hoping, planning and watching other American cities start their own programs, San Francisco's bike-sharing program is finally about to start rolling. At noon Thursday, after Mayor Ed Lee takes a baby-blue bike for the first official spin, Bay Area Bike Share will be open for business.

It is not a purely San Francisco program. Bay Area Bike Share, as its name implies, is regional - somewhat. The program, which encourages short-term bike rides to get around town, will station half of its 700 bikes at kiosks in San Francisco. The rest will be scattered along the Caltrain corridor in Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose.

The idea is to make it easier to get around without a car, using bikes to get from transit to work or home or to make shorter trips about town.

"Making it proximate to transit does a lot to make transit more convenient," said John Goodwin, a spokesman for the Metropolitan Transportation Commission. "You don't have to schlep a bike on Caltrain between San Francisco and the Peninsula."

Membership needed

Bay Area Bike Share's bikes are available to anyone who purchases a membership - priced at $88 annually, $22 for three days or $9 for 24 hours. Bikes are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Members can take unlimited rides of up to 30 minutes, picking up a bike at any of the stations, using a key fob or electronic code, and dropping them off at any station. Since the idea of bike sharing is to make bicycles available for short trips, additional fees are levied for longer rides.

"It's not bike rental," said Ed Reiskin, director of transportation of the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency. "It's sort of the difference between car sharing and car rental. It's there for short trips, errands, to fill a gap."

In San Francisco, bike stations are concentrated in the Financial District, along the northeastern waterfront, in and around Union Square, at Civic Center and South of Market. In San Jose, they're primarily downtown, and in Mountain View, Palo Alto and Redwood City they're situated at Caltrain stations, downtowns and employment centers.

Bicycling advocates and transportation officials expect bike sharing to take off quickly, as it has in other U.S. cities, including New York, Washington and Chicago. Already, as kiosks were set up and bikes placed in them on Wednesday, they've attracted attention.

"You can already see people kicking the wheels, sniffing the bikes and asking, 'What is this?' " said Heath Maddox, bicycle-sharing program manager for the Municipal Transportation Agency.

Starting small

Kit Hodge, deputy director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, said Bay Area Bike Share is starting with a small number of bikes and stations in San Francisco compared with other cities, but she expects it to catch on quickly and drive demand for a bigger system. Officials already plan to add 300 bikes in the five cities within months, but Hodge envisions a system with 3,000 bikes. New York's system, launched early this summer, has 6,000.

"We're very eager to see what we can learn from this rather small system," she said. "We want to see it work so we can satiate the demand."

New York's system has been immensely popular but suffered from early technical problems. The Bay Area system is being operated by Alta Bicycle Share, the same firm that runs the New York system. But Maddox and Hodge said they are confident the New York troubles have been overcome and won't be repeated here.