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to the san francisco board of supervisor's land use and economic development. i'm scott wiener and supervisor david chiu will be joining us

shortly our clerk is lisa miller i want to thank sf tv. miss miller are there any announcements? >> items acted to know today will appear on the november 19th board of supervisor's agenda unless otherwise stated. >> thank you madam clerk can you start by calling item number 2? >> extend existing roadway. >> okay john from the department of public works. good afternoon. the department received a request from an applicant to reconstruct that portion to install a privately

maintained drive way that will lead to his new garage. at that point the applicant was not ready he was working with neighbors and they are now currently ready and that's why this application is in front of the full board with recommendations for full approval. >> colleagues if there's no questions or comment we'll open it up to public comment. is there any public comment on item number 2? okay seeing none public comments is closed. colleagues do i have a motion to forward item 2 to the full board with positive recommendation. take that without objection that will be the order. madam could you

please call item number 1. >> the bay area bike share program plannings for expansion for city wide roll out. >> thank you i requested this hearing on bike sharing in san francisco to receive an update on the initial roll out of the initial pilot program as well as future anticipated and much desired growth of the program so it can become a city wide program a few months ago we launched bay area bike share in san francisco san mateo and santa clara counties and that will increase to 500 bikes next year. bike sharing is a very important part of the future of transportation in san francisco in terms of becoming truly a

transit first city we all want to have more access to biking in san francisco and this is a key part of that strategy. for people who have bikes they may not want to carry those bikes around with them all the time and having the option to be without your bike and still bike when necessary is important and in addition there are people that don't own a bike but they want to be able to bike when they need to get somewhere and muni or driving or walking isn't necessarily an option. so transit first is about giving people as many options as possible biking and bike sharing are one of those options. it's also important that we move consistent ly to

have a city wide bike sharing program currently the pilot is focussed on the downtown civic center south of market area which is terrific but i can attest to the fact that in my district i get regular requests and queries when are we going to have bike sharing and it's important that we stay on track that we keep the momentum and move toward city wide roll out so the purpose of today's hearing how it's gone so far what the experiences and usage levels have been and what the challenge has been and increasing from 350 bikes to 500 bikes early next year and in terms of the city wide

expansion so i look forward to today's important conversation about this important program. >> thank you and i want to thank the chair for introducing this hearing item today and also i was present at the ribbon cutting for the bike sharing program early in the fall and i can't tell you what a difference it's made already in our district actually seeing our residents and workers using them which is great and as someone who's a new cyclist here in the city having the flexibility not having to worry about storing your bike or parking your bike it just changes how you can consider transporting yourself to do meeting and run, errands throughout the day and of course we'd like to see it

expand to other neighborhoods in the city go to other neighborhoods whether it's the mission or castro and central parts of the city as well i know it's hard when you think about investing in a program but one of the best ways to get increased ridership is to have an expanded program it's kind of like the chicken and the egg it limits the times of riders that you are going to get you expand it do a larger investment it's a riskier investment to make but you will probably get more riders so i'm looking forward to ways that we can expand this program into other neighborhoods it's been incredible thus far and i want to thank the bike coalition just on the poling that they

did on biking in san francisco as someone that's trying to bike more as i see all the data that sfmta and our transportation authority presents to us on the future of congestion here in the city so my commitment to being one less car in the neighborhood so what voters believe is going to increase their ridership throughout the city and i think the bike sharing program is going to be an incredibly important parts of that and you don't have to worry about parking and locking your bike but i think about it all the time where am i going to lock up my bike or park it so i worry about that aspect not even just travelling to get to the location i want to get to. >> thank you. >> briefly i want to thank all

of you here who have been working on this program so far and ever since i saw bike sharing in other cities it was certainly my perspective when we started that we didn't have enough bikes as part of the initial roll out and despite that we've been fortunate as a city this program has been as successful as it is but to see the full benefits for the entire city i think we have to get far beyond where we are. i've been really gratified to see residents workers and visitors take advantage of it and it's been helping to improve quality of life on the streets so i'm looking forward to the presentation today and move this forward regardless of neighborhood and income and look forward to working with my

colleagues on this. >> we have salidarenolds and for members of the public who wish to make public comment, we have blue cards at the front if you would fill one out that would be terrific. >> we're very excited to be here to talk about bike sharing launch what we've seen happen and where we want to go with this i'm cynthia reynolds responsible for the school safety implementation throughout the city when we think about our goals in terms of you know around environmental goals as well as reducing healthcare and transportation costs for san francisco san, franciscans bike

sharing is one of the most cost effective investments you have all eluded to that if you already bike it removes a lot of the obstacles in your way where to store your bike park your bike whether it will be there when you come back but there's another group of people we're excited to share bike sharing with and that's people who don't bicycle currently. it removes barriers for new bicyclists. you can just pickup a bike and go for very little cost to try it out and it has really been a powerful

catalyst for that change in a lot of the cities where it's been rolled out so i'll introduce keith with a quick overview for people who are watching or listening who don't know about bike sharing or what it is and what we think that investment looks like and how much of an investment we need to get to a sustainable system in san francisco. so keith is my colleague at the sfmta working on bike sharing on 4 years very long years now. he's been working on active transportation projects for the last 13 years and he's gathered a lot of expertise and has shared that expertise from washington, d.c. to boulder colorado and we're now part of many cities coming together and

sharing information under the umbrella so it's a really exciting time to be doing this work and with that i'll turn it over to keith. >> thanks. good afternoon. chair wiener and members of the committee i'm thrilled to be here today and to tell you i rode a bike here today. this is the first time i've actually talked about something that's happened as opposed to something we're struggling to make happen. so i'll just launch right into it. so very briefly i'll give an overview of what bicycle sharing is. it's very much like car sharing

in that its membership based it's for short-term use we have rental companies that will rent you a bike for a half a day or full day it's practical and convenient and available 24 hours a day 7 days a week and last but not least it's sweeping the nation, it's sweeping europe and the globe really it's something that's really caught on in recent years and also it's healthy and clean and unlike most car sharing i think car to go is the exception but bicycle sharing allows members to make one way trips point to point. so this is the bike we have here in san francisco hopefully most people have seen them by now they are purpose designed

and built from the ground up heavy weight bicycle sturdy and robust with a lot of design features which i won't go into but it's not your average bicycle. so it's really not so much -- or third generation bicycle sharing which is what we're talking about with the system in san francisco and other cities it's less about the bicycle than it is about information technology and the information technology is mostly stored in the station and this is a diagram two views of the station and this is one of the most commonly used systems in use right now mostly in north america developed by the city of montreal and also in use in london and melbou r.n. e and minnesota and boston san francisco bay area and soon

to be in use in vancouver portland and seattle and so this system was designed in montreal to be seasonal so as a result it's a portable and modular system. what that means here we can deploy them quickly and easily without doing any excavation it simplifies deployment significantly they are battery powered using solar and as mentioned there's no excavation they are not even bolted down they are held down by their own considerable weight and the basic components consist of panels com prize -- there's a

kiosk on there people that welcome up with a credit card and get a membership and one other i think one of the challenges i'll say so far the biggest challenge we've had and they have had this in other cities is communicating how the pricing for bicycle riding works so 2 tiers and in order to use this system you have to be a member so i'm an annual member bought one for 88 dollars or you can walk up to the kiosk and buy a casual membership once you are a member that grants you the right to use the system you can make un limited 30 minute trips for no additional charge

however if your trip goes beyond 30 minutes you will pay more each additional half an hour use will cost you an additional 7 dollars so it caps out at -- the whole intent is to incentivize short use of the bicycles. >> if you could elaborate on that a little bit in terms of emphasis on short trips and not renting out a bike for the whole day. >> the point is short-term use we have a very healthy and established bicycle rental industry economy in san francisco this is not to compete with that you can rent a bike for 30 dollars a day so bicycle sharing is not for any specific type of trip except for short trip so we do expect

and encourage people from out of town to use this system but they will and we have been working closely with the rental companies in san francisco and we're aware of their concerns and are certainly working with them. >> so that's pricing. just a brief overview of how we got into this i've been working on this for 4 years. 3 years ago we got major funding from a metropolitan transportation system and the air quality management district. as you mentioned initially it was scoped to roll out with a thousand bikes. spread out between redwood city and south bay cities it took us several

years to get going and the reality is they end up being more expensive than you thought they were going to. so half those bikes and 35 stations in san francisco we do have the funding in hand so another 150 bikes for san francisco and we expect to roll that out early 2014 in the first quarter sometime very excited about that. just want to talk a little bit about -- first of all, this stretch is basically from midmarket, market and van ness to the embarcadero and the financial district and a good swatch of the water front. we had permitting