A significant cluster of Bay Area Bike Share’s new planned stations are in the Mission District, and installation is expected to begin later this month.
The expansion will grow the bike sharing program from 700 to 7,000 bicycles around the region. Around 35 bike sharing stations are in the works in the Mission, according to an image released by the bike share group. Participants pay a monthly or annual fee and can unlock bikes in a variety of ways, including using a Clipper card.
While most of the stations planned for the Mission have already secured their permits, one was considered at a San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency hearing on Friday morning, and a few neighbors were dismayed at the idea of losing parking. The station, at 17th and Valencia streets, was among 16 stations citywide heard on Friday morning.
“Parking is a premium in San Francisco, it’s just like housing,” said District 6 resident John Nulty. “You start taking away parking, it’s going to create more problems for everybody.”
One resident who lives near the proposed 17th and Valencia station said the area is particularly impacted.
“We have a big problem there…losing spots just means fighting with your neighbors,” he said.
The 17th and Valencia station likely just needs the engineer’s approval before moving forward.
“Parking loss is not grounds for denying a bike share permit,” explained Heath Maddox, a planner with the transportation agency, after the meeting.
The expansion has been in the works for years. At an outreach meeting Bay Area Bike Share held in the Mission in 2015, residents raised concerns about areas still left out of the expansion plans, accessibility for low-income riders, and corporate sponsorship – some said they didn’t want to be riding around on bikes emblazoned with, say, the Facebook logo. That won’t be the case – the corporate sponsor is in fact Ford Motor Company.
A few dozen stations already exist, most of them in SoMa, downtown, and along the Embarcadero. The plan is to install all of the stations by the end of 2018. The images, which show three different expansion areas, show around 80 percent of the total stations Bay Area Bike Share intends to construct.
Here’s the San Francisco map released by Bay Area Bike Share.
I agree! We don’t need any more bike stations. Not everybody can ride a bike, seniors and small children for example!
They are already putting bike parking in the new housing. They don’t need it on the street as well. Soon there will be more bikes than people using them, or, maybe there already are. There are a lot of parked bikes in those bike shares now. No wonder people are parking in the middle of the street and in the bike lanes. If you want people to park legally you have to give them a legal place to park.