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 to be successful. >> what with are the 11 factors? >> i can't list them all but things like did he density of

residents topography bicycle use walking there's a few more as well i can't think right now but i'd be happy to follow up with you on those we have a whole paper to explain the methodology. so if you zoom in on the suitability city wide obviously and if you look in the black and upper right our initial service area then you look at upper market and the mission, these are areas of extremely high suitability for bicycle sharing and when you look at soma -- we skipped a large number of the stations early on there are pockets of extremely high suitability but there's also pockets next to high suitability. in terms of

prioritizing makes sense to go with the suitably areas so this is exciting too. these are maps i haven't is shown yet. much like other cities we hosted a bicycle sharing crowd sourcing map on our website allowing people from the public to go to the website and placing a dot suggesting a bicycle sharing station likewise you could like somebody's dot and so that graphic which i don't have is not that elluminating itself but using advanced mapping software we were able to produce a heat map of where the density of the requests and other people's likes were the highest and it was interesting what the results were again confirms a lot of our earlier

work and this decision to move into the mission and upper market. i'll zoom in on this for you too so you can see a little better. so the area in the upper right is our initial service area and the others -- there's various expansion scenarios that we've been looking at but the area circled in white is indeed the mission valencia corridor and you see along upper market also the castro and noe valley and there's a hire density of red and yellow heat mapping than in soma so if you are just prioritizing perhaps to make sense to go there later when you have the extra stations. our immediate expansion is not that big 15 stations and we

also have additional funding so we'll try to get as many additional stations we can. five more stations. >> that orange area is for the 500 bicycles? >> so this would be for 5 hundred bikes yeah and my last slide full expansion based upon this suitability map. >> uh-huh. >> we think that if i had 20 to 23 million dollars right now, i would just blanket the north east quad ran of the city with bicycles. that's 9 and a half square miles 32 percent of the residents of san francisco. realistically we'll be looking

at something more like this. there will be un doubt ed ly satellite areas that are also scoring in the very high suitability. >> how many bikes? >> this is really just the same polygon as this. we don't know exactly how many more bikes would be represented by that, but i think by the time we got there you know, we'll be close to there. i think treasure island is going to be a while and hunter's shipyard these are big projects just getting online but city college and sf state with transit out there and bart those could work very well. >> so in terms of the additional 150 bikes i want to

have bike sharing as quickly as possible but in terms of choosing to expand rather than filling in the density in the existing areas the methodology in terms of -- if you have everything really spread out, it's going to create challenges for the system so in terms of the expansion versus filling in density, what's the thinking there? >> so our initial thinking and it was a little bit simplistic and cookie cutter following an industry standard rule of thumb that came out of of paris first 28 stations per square mile one station every 2 and a half blocks. and that was our guiding principal however you

know when we were cut back to 350 bikes and 35 stations we didn't actually change the service area we just deployed at a somewhat reduced density and we've seen it's actually working quite well and exceeding dc our closest benchmark and by choosing paris as a benchmark and when you look at cities like denver and minnesota they are not close to density as what paris is. but the system is working now and so i don't think that we're making any compromises by maintaining density lower than we initially planned to and moving into an area where we know usage will be quite high

and what i forgot to mention but crucial to consider in the list of reasons why we would not put more stations in soma right now but really the bicycle facilities on upper market and along valencia corridor are much better and a much better and safer place for people to ride so i answer that question every time i talk about bicycle sharing what are you doing to improve safety and roll out new facilities so if we can put bicycle sharing where we have the facilities we'll do that. >> a couple of questions i want to understand a little bit more about who's actually using bike sharing. you have some data between membership users and more casual users but whether

folks are using it more for work or pleasure any kind of demographic information like that? >> we're conducting a before or after survey for us and i think the survey actually closed last month so i don't think how long it's going to take her and her team to process the data but we should have them very soon. >> good. different question -- i was just looking on the web and there's statistics that still 20, 25 percent of the public doesn't use credit cards and have you thought about accessibility issues for people that don't have access -- >> we certainly have and we have work to do there but we have reached out to taking a page out of dc's book and reached out and begun talks --

there's no way of requiring -- now we have credit cards and information technology we can track who has the bikes but so the idea would be to partner with an organization like bank on sf that gives people access to credit and gets into the financial system so that's one strategy and also a number of strategies that we're looking at and i'm acutely aware that although bicycle sharing is an extremely affordable mode of transportation the only more affordable is actually walking but there are barriers to it and we're working on it. >> i'm glad you guys are

focussed on it i'd love to hear what the solutions are. do you have any sense on how users have done with accidents involving first time riders do you have any sense of how safe these are? i have tried the bikes feel very sturdy to me but i'm curious. >> that i'm aware of we haven't had any reports of injuries or collisions in the system. one of the points people try to make to me this is dangerous but the data really show it's actually quite safe and that bicycle sharing user as a population, are involved in collisions at a lower rate than cyclists among the population at large. they have had one death on the system in london

but they have like over 5 million trips so statistics ly a safe mode of travel. >> thank you. >> supervisor kim? >> thank you. i'm sure it makes logical sense how you picked the areas. >> how we picked them? >> is it based on data? >> also looking at suitability analysis so without actually running an analysis at some future point but understanding where a large number of those factors are going to converge basically we're talking about density of all things i mean if you looked -- there's been interesting work done by a

former google cartographer of maps of people tweeting or posting photos to instagram and you look at these maps basically where people are doing their thing. >> would you look at expanding the time from 30 minutes? can you expand it? >> i think everything is open for change. that sort of, that scheme of 30 minutes free we inherited that from europe and that's what most of the systems in north america are. new york city is 45 minutes the size of their system dwarfs ours but i think as a system it's something that could be thought about. by the same token it could be that the idea of a two

tiered membership pricing system we can throw that out as well i think in dade county florida the price there is five dollars every half an hour and they are really happy with that. so i think as we move forward in time and size everything is open for reevaluation. >> i think you should definitely look at the time it takes for someone to bike from the farthest bike sharing points so there's no way people are going to make it in 30 minutes from point a to point b. >> you are welcome to lock that bike back up and grab another bike. >> i think that would decrease my likely hood of using it. >> definitely could but nothing to stop somebody from -- >> i hope that would not be