The Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) plans to implement a pilot bike-sharing program in the Bay Area in an effort to reduce pollution. The project will deploy 1,000 bicycles at up to 100 kiosks in San Francisco, Redwood City, Menlo Park, Palo Alto and San Jose in the next year or so.
Kiosks will be installed at Caltrain stations along the peninsula transportation corridor, as well as in strategic locations throughout the cities.
Initially, 50 kiosks with 500 bicycles will be stationed in San Francisco—around Market Street, the Financial District, the Civic Center and a few other locations. The remaining kiosks and bikes will be placed along the peninsula near major universities, downtown areas, business parks, and other busy locales. Each kiosk will hold around 10 bikes.
The system will work much like car-sharing programs such as Zipcar. Commuters will pay an annual subscription fee, allowing them to “check out” bikes from kiosks using radio frequency-equipped smartcards. For no additional charge, they will be able to use the bikes for a short period of time—up to an hour—before “checking in” at a kiosk near their final destination.
An incremental charge will be administered for going over the allotted time. Electronic reservation will also be an option, and payment amounts will be determined at a later date.
“You won’t take your bike with you on the Bart or the Caltrain,” said Aaron Richardson, spokesperson for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District (BAAQMD). “Rather, the program is a way of completing the commute.”
The chief goal of the program is to get cars off the roads to curb carbon emissions in the Bay Area, where, according to an October 27 press release by the MTC, transportation accounts for more than half of air pollution.
“The project aims to demonstrate how regional bike-sharing can improve air quality through the estimated reduction of approximately 3.1 tons per year in criteria pollutants and 1583 tons per year in GHGs from the initial deployment,” Richardson wrote in an e-mail to The Daily.
In addition to environmental benefits, the program has other potential draws.
“Bike sharing that works regionally as well as in San Francisco will provide greater connectivity and make the system more useful,” said Mayor Gavin Newsom in the press release. “As bicycling increases in San Francisco and the Bay Area, key projects like this will encourage others to add bicycling to their travel solutions.”
The program could also promote physical health by adding more cardiovascular activity to the commuters’ daily routines.
Funds were made available to the program through the Climate Initiatives Competitive Grants Program, implemented by the MTC in June 2010, which called for innovative solutions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the Bay Area.
As of now, the program has over $7 million in funding from the MTC, the BAAQMD and other partners.
The bikes will be procured “following a formal competitive bidding process to select a vendor or vendors,” Richardson wrote. He said he wasn’t sure what types of bikes would be provided, but he added that GPS units may be installed to deter theft.
Similar programs exist throughout the nation and the world—in Chicago and Denver, among other cities—but the deployment will be the “first of its kind in California and the largest regional effort in the nation,” Richardson said.
That only accounts for the initial deployment. If the pilot is successful, the MTC, in conjunction with the BAAQMD, plans to expand the program to all nine counties in the region.
“The project will provide a range of ‘lessons learned,’ demonstrate viability of bike-sharing in the Bay Area and under what conditions it can be most successful (i.e., demographics, terrain, size of project within each hub) that will be useful to the region and cities along transportation routes that are considering bike-sharing,” wrote Richardson.
The pilot program is still in its early stages, but Richardson expects that the bikes will be in place and ready to ride by the end of 2011.