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 issues at pier

40. but this is the initial service area and how do we choose that service area? i'll get to that later i'll talk a little bit about some early use if that's all right these are interesting and exciting numbers. i just want to grab my notes really quickly. >> so this shows trips from mid-august through last week i wasn't able to chart the latest data. overall san francisco trips the blue line peaks out at almost 12 hundred trips we're averaging somewhere between 900 and 1000 trips a day healthy use translates into 2.5 trips per day per bicycle

which is a number we're happy with and the blue shaded region represents that's trips by annual members. and then the green line below represents trips by casual members. you can see where the green bar and the lowest valleys are on both of the blue graphs that's weekends and you can see that the casual usage is higher generally on the weekend where as the annual members and overall really peaks midweek. >> why do you think that is and some of the casual users people enjoying their weekends. >> certainly. >> why are they most likely to rise during the week? >> i think a lot of commute trips but there's more people

in the service area during the week there for work but may be using the bikes for trips un related to work as well. >> the feedback that i have gotten to expand on that point, the locations are really good for work right now so they are at convenient locations if you were going from home to work and between hotels and caltrans that makes sense so they can do the errands the grocery shopping and meeting friends. so i wasn't sure if you had maps where you kind of see the usage along these selected stops that were picked for this pilot. >> i'll get to it in the next few slides. but in terms of

maps what we see here today is really preliminary data un verified so we are going to be getting a lot of data about the way the system is used and so we will be analyzing that ourselves and very soon we'll put the data out in the public realm and have the private people analyze that so hold onto that question and we'll see more in months to come. >> so i went over that particular chart. we've seen over 50 thousand rides so far over the last several months 2 and a half trips per day per bike we track ridership in washington, d.c. which before

new york city launched this summer with 6000 bikes capital bike share was the biggest bike share system in the united states and the longest running big one and in many ways very analogo u.s. to san francisco and we're seeing 1.9 trips per day per bike so we've exceeded performance in the dc system and another interesting fact total mileage ridden estimated using average trip length almost five times around the earth. >> excuse me, just in terms of experience so far with availability at stations -- i

know you don't want it to be empty so in terms of redistribution and overall management how is that going? >> looks like it's going well. my understanding is it's met all of the contractual obligations in terms of not exceeding certain performance measures but we've heard from certain members of the public that there are times where they were un able to find a bicycle and so you know we're working with the vendor to improve performance there but i don't think there's any contractual issues there it is challenging and even 2 months after launch still getting the hang of things and we also have in our

warehouse a number of docks and we'll address some of those issues. >> would that about for the additional 150 bikes we're going to be getting? >> well, we're going to get more docks but right now we have docks that aren't being used so we could potentially roll those out ahead of time. >> but if you don't have the bikes to fill how would that happen? >> there are actually a few bikes that haven't been rolled out as well. >> okay thanks. >> one more slide on data talking about membership. we have almost 2000 members in san francisco that's annual members and what you see is a pretty

steep increase in membership right around launch and steadily moving up but starting to plateau a little so as the days grow shorter and weather gets cooler the lines along the bottom showing again a similar trend gradually levelling off but nonetheless holding steady. so this is a graphic from our october 15th open house which we had to talk about expansion. and i'll say that although i certainly would have liked to roll out thousands of bicycles we were disappointed to roll

out 300, 350, that has afforded us an opportunity to do things a little more thoughtfully. if we had rolled out with the initial number they would have been in that service area and the initial thinking was when we got the missing 150 bicycles we would indeed fill in the gaps in that service area but we've been thinking about it hearing from people watching how the system is being used and our thinking now is today ahead and move into areas where we don't have stations now that are basically contiguo u.s. and go around the corner down

mission and valencia into the mission and this doesn't mean filling in isn't a good idea but right now if we have to prioritize, sure would be nice if it went to where i live a little more or where i play and i think mission and upper market definitely fall into that category. i have an couple of slides that explain our thinking more on that. so this is a suitability analysis that we did. darker blue areas represent areas of extremely high bicycle sharing suitability this is based on 11 different factors according to studies in other cities correlate. so we now if we started small we wanted