SFMTA Releases Preliminary Map of Bike-Share Station Locations

The SF Municipal Transportation Agency has released a map of 41 locations [PDF] being considered for the first 35 bike-share stations in downtown SF. Six of those stations will be installed, “pending additional funding,” after the launch of the initial 350-bike pilot project, the agency’s website says.

“With its abundance of factors conducive to bike-sharing and its high concentration of regional transit, the downtown Market Street corridor from Van Ness to the Embarcadero and the surrounding neighborhoods immediately jumps out at as the best place to start a limited-scale bike-sharing system that we hope will prove successful early on and form the basis of a much larger system,” the SFMTA said on its website, where you can find more detail on how the station sites were chosen.

The long-delayed launch of bike-share is set for August, though the rest of the 500 bikes originally promised for San Francisco won’t come until some months later due to a lack of funding, according to the Bay Area Air Quality Management Distict, which is coordinating the five-city program.

Meanwhile, the SF Board of Supervisors passed a resolution Tuesday urging the SFMTA to pursue a full-scale bike-share launch in San Francisco in 2014. “The SFMTA has estimated that the city has the capacity for a system of around 3,000 bikes, a number more in line with other large cities like New York and London,” the SF Bicycle Coalition said in a news release.

New York City began rolling out the 330 stations in the first phase of its bike-share network this month, and hopes to expand to about 600 stations and 10,000 bikes next year. Long Beach plans to launch a system with 2,500 bikes this year.

In a statement, Supervisor Scott Wiener, who introduced the resolution, said, “MTA must aggressively pursue expanding to a city-wide program by next year, so that San Francisco can reap the benefits of a full-scale bike-share program that will reduce traffic, improve public transit and stimulate the local economy.”

Heath Maddox, bike-share program manager for the SFMTA, said the agency expects to present the proposed locations at public meetings within the next couple of months.