Streetsblog San Francisco

Despite the much ballyhooed talk by San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom that his city will implement a public bike share pilot (two years of talk that has garnered numerous press hits), the first bike share program in the Bay Area will likely be implemented by the middle of 2010 in Santa Clara County by the Valley Transportation Authority (VTA).  While small size may still be a liability to its success and long term funding sources must be determined, the VTA is miles ahead of other transit operators in completing the process necessary to deliver a pilot.

The VTA has wrapped up its market research data collection, is completing its business model, and will release its final analysis report by the end of this year for a pilot project intended to link three Caltrain stations in Mountain View, Palo Alto, and San Jose with multiple satellite destination points, such as Stanford and San Jose State Universities and job centers like Moffett Park and San Jose City Hall. 

The VTA used an initial $75,000 from their general budget to hire Economic and Planning Systems (EPS) to conduct the planning work, but applied for a $500,000 Safe Routes to Transit grant to implement the pilot, money that will come from bridge tolls collected by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC). VTA has learned that the project has been ranked for funding, though it might not get the money for a month or two.

"Bikes in general are given short shrift in suburban sprawling areas," said Chris Augenstein, Deputy Director of Planning at VTA. "We can do a lot more to make bicycles a real mode and integrate them into everything we do."

While the VTA insists it is too early to start speculating about how many bikes would be involved in the program, they've conducted over 1200 surveys at target areas, with particular focus on Caltrain riders and corporate partners who sit on their Bike Share working group, including Yahoo! and Adobe. When pressed on a number of bikes, Augenstein said that Paris' Velib bicycles cost over $3,000 each and suggested I could do the math to figure out how many bikes the MTC grant would buy (over 150, though other start-up costs must be factored in). He also said the VTA was studying advertising models with companies like Clear Channel (which runs Barcelona's Bicing bike-share program) or JC Decaux (which runs Velib) to offset operating and expansion costs.

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In the past few weeks, Stanford University students have built support for a proposal to reduce parking, widen sidewalks, and eventually close eight blocks of University Avenue in Palo Alto to motor vehicles. The Palo Alto Pedestrian Mall (PAPM) started out as an assignment in a "Creating Infectious Action" class at the design school at Stanford and has since garnered support among transportation committee members of the city council and businesses along the avenue, many of them restaurants that want to take advantage of extra sidewalk seating. 

Amrita Mahale, a masters student in engineering at Stanford, explained that their assignment in class was to create a social movement that would reduce gas consumption, and after looking at traffic mitigation around campus, she and her fellow students thought that University Avenue would be more visible and significant. They started a Facebook page, which she was proud to note had over 1300 members in less than two weeks, canvassed businesses along the street to build support among a key constituency, conducted informal surveys of street users to measure their response ("all positive" she said), and enlisted Palo Alto's former mayor and current councilmember, Yoriko Kishimoto, who has become a champion for the proposal.

"Now I think we have enough momentum for the city to take us seriously," said Mahale.

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