Trendy San Francisco Is Unlikely Latecomer to the Bike Share Party

The Bay Area has finally launched a publicly subsidized bicycle rental program. What took so long?

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PR NEWSWIRE / AP

Bay Area Bike Share

San Francisco is always on the cusp of the latest trends in technology and business. It’s a place that embraces eco-fashion, a city where residents plaster “These Come From Trees” on paper towel dispensers and take part in curbside composting. So why did it take until the latter half of 2013 for the city to get a bike-sharing program up and running?

In the past few years, bike-sharing has spread quickly across in the United States, hitting cities like New York, Washington, D.C., and Chicago as well as smaller ones like Minneapolis and Chattanooga, Tenn. Though there are some small bike-sharing initiatives in California, like one at the University of California at Irvine, program administrators are touting Bay Are Bike Share as the first operational program in the state. For some residents, it’s overdue. “We have been pushing for it for many years in San Francisco and watching other cities getting bike-sharing much sooner than us,” says Kristin Smith, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition. “Our city has been falling behind.”

(MORE: New York’s Bike Share Program Needs a Serious Debugging)

A big reason for the late start in San Francisco is bureaucracy. Though almost 700 bikes hit the pavement just two weeks ago, the seed for the idea was planted three years ago, when the area’s air pollution control agency and other parties applied for a grant to make it happen. The $11 million pilot program is designed to be regional rather than contained to just one municipality, like New York City’s bike share. And that means program managers have had extra layers of red tape to cut through before bike stations could be activated across five cities: San Francisco, Redwood City, Palo Alto, Mountain View and San Jose.

Funding for that regional project came largely from federal tax dollars funneled through a state authority, which was then mixed with money from regional outfits—a lengthy process. “These systems are quite expensive. They’re like transits, labor-intensive and capital-intensive,” says Karen Schkolnick, a program manager who works at the pollution authority, known familiarly as the Air District. “Business models are still emerging.” Bike shares often run on a mix of advertising dollars, government subsidies and user fees. New York, for example, secured a $40 million sponsorship from Citibank, a feat the Bay Area administrators would like to imitate with their own backer.

(MORE: We Tried This: Citi Bike, NYC’s New Bike-Sharing Program)

Administrators have enough money to run the pilot phase for up to two years and plan to increase the number of bikes to 1,000 by early 2014. Smith and other bike-share advocates are thrilled to see the communal cycles on the street, but they’re also frustrated by the limited size of the program and want faster expansion; more bikes would likely yield better data to support the increase in funding that expansion would require. The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition is now lobbying the mayor to pay for more bikes in San Francisco, she says. But that could potentially create inequality for cities involved in a program that administrators would like to expand uniformly across the region; while New York’s bike-sharing is billed as a way to take short trips in a dense city center, Schkolnick says San Francisco’s is more about dealing with commutes that typically go from suburb to city center and back again.

While city residents are pushing for quick growth, program administrators are methodically surveying users and assessing the value of ad space on their bikes. They’re also working to secure private funding that could turn the pilot program into a permanent transit option for pedal-pushers in the Bay Area. Though she wouldn’t say which companies had expressed interest in being partners, Schkolnick said she’s spoken to parties from technology, retail, finance and health sectors. In the simplest scenario, the Bay Area Bike Share program would recruit a single big-time funder like New York City found with Citi. But a company like Google might only be interested in plastering its logo on bikes that get employees around Mountain View, where its headquarters is located. And having multiple sponsors means more complication, which might in turn mean slower progress in building out the project.

(MORE: As New York’s Bike Share Fixes Failures, It Needs to Cope With Success)

By the third week of use, about 2,000 people have signed up to be members of the Bay Area program, with each getting unlimited 30 minutes trips for $88 per year. Collectively, those users and riders who buy day passes have taken more than 10,000 trips, and administrators would like to eventually have up to 10,000 bikes that people could pick up and drop off at stations throughout the region. “This is something,” Smith says, “that’s been a long time coming.”

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