Dude, Where’s My Bike Share?

Shared bike services are expanding rapidly in cities throughout the world, but San Francisco has been slow to adapt. Cycling advocates say City Hall’s status quo bias is hindering mobility and making streets less safe—and they’re fighting back.

Brad Williford rides his own bike often. But sometimes, he has errands that are less conducive to a two-way trip, so he frequently uses Ford GoBike as well. He began wondering why bikeshare wasn’t more widespread, despite its burgeoning popularity, and noticed that many outlying districts in San Francisco didn’t have any bikeshare stations. While Motivate, the operator of Ford GoBike, has proposed expanding its stations to densely cover the whole city, the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency (SFMTA) has mostly only approved them in SoMa, Downtown, the Haight, and parts of the Mission District. So Williford started a petition group, Our Bikes, to advocate for bikeshare expansion.

“We are in a position where the default is to say no. We need the default to be ‘yes,’” Williford explained.

As of 2017, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC), which negotiated Ford GoBike’s exclusive bikeshare contract with the entire bay area, had identified new stations for a proposed Phase 3 expansion. But as of late 2018, virtually none had opened in District 2—the Marina, Pacific Heights, and Cow Hollow—and those that were approved prompted fierce neighborhood opposition. Districts 1, 4, and 7 on the westside still have no stations.

Supervisor Catherine Stefani, who represents District 2, came under fire after telling members of the Pacific Heights Residents Association, “It will not come to District 2,” referring to Ford GoBike. In July, Stefani stepped in to halt plans for three proposed stations in her District, but the Supervisor later clarified that she did not believe the company and the City’s transit planners had conducted enough community outreach.

Stefani later sent out a survey to constituents soliciting feedback on seven proposed bikeshare stations in the Marina and Pacific Heights. 

“The MTA did not do their outreach. So when I heard about it, and they had the hearings scheduled, I called the MTA and I put a stop to it—not a stop to bikeshare entirely, but I put a stop to them because they did not do the proper outreach. We have since met with them, and we are working on a plan, that they are going to roll these out with me and the community at the table,” Stefani said at a candidate debate on September 24th.

Newly-appointed Supervisor Vallie Brown, however, threw her support behind a proposed bikeshare station at the entrance to Golden Gate Park, which staff approved. Williford said his group sent Brown’s office over 80 emails to encourage her support.

“What we’ve seen is if you have a Supervisor on board, it is approved,” Williford said. “That’s the most powerful leverage we’ve been able to find.”

The MTC has plans for over 7,000 bikeshare stations throughout the Bay Area, making it the nation’s second-largest urban bikeshare system, after New York. But cycling advocates say that San Francisco’s political culture of “Supervisorial prerogative” has led to an uneven, sclerotic expansion in the City.  Part of the problem is that while each individual bikeshare station requires local outreach and a public hearing before approval, the threshold for determining neighborhood support remains unclear. What remains further nebulous, advocates say, is the process that unfolds after a proposed station is put on hold. 

Williford grew curious when he requested community outreach data from SFMTA staff on proposed bikeshare stations and found that some stations had received up to 86% support, but had been marked “Held” (at Arlington & Miguel); meanwhile, a proposed station at 25th & Utah was approved with only 47.6% support.

Paul Rose, Chief Spokesperson for the SFMTA, explained that comments in favor of stations aren’t counted as “votes” to approve them. “There is no threshold for community support necessary for approval,” Rose said.

“The thing that’s hard for us is that there are a handful of stations that are just in limbo. It’s not that anyone has said yes or no, there’s just no determination,” said Jean Walsh, Director of External Relations at Motivate. “Our understanding is that the MTA needs to see more public support for these stations. People who are upset, or angry, or don’t want change, are the ones who are able to attend hearings and make their voices heard—that’s why this advocacy work is so important.”

Rose explained that the SFMTA usually approves controversy-free bikeshare stations within a week of their Public Hearing. But for more contentious proposals, the “next steps” vary on a case-by-case basis. For District 2, SFMTA staff met with Supervisor Stefani to discuss proposed locations; for some proposals, they may work with Motivate to find alternate locations.

“We’re continuing to engage residents in discussions about the proposals…to ensure that all voices are heard and concerns are addressed,” Rose said, citing the Glen Park Association as a particular example.

For her part, Walsh said that Motivate takes a similarly flexible approach to ongoing outreach. “There’s not a cookie-cutter approach, but we do have a big toolkit…to meet with whatever stakeholders are relevant,” she said.

“The SFMTA does not have the same criteria for community outreach for all shared mobility services,” Rose said. “However, for bike share stations, Motivate reaches out to the direct abutter of the proposed station, and coordinates with the Supervisor’s offices to reach out to neighborhood, business, and other community groups in the area. Motivate also sends mailings in advance of public hearings to all residents and property owners within 250 feet of the proposed station, in addition to posting public hearing notices on the block of the proposed station.”

Still, Williford and Walsh point to the uncertainty of the process itself as a hindrance to effective outreach.

“We are meeting with neighborhood groups, doing site visits, community meetings and workshops—we are doing extensive outreach for all of these stations, so it’s very frustrating to go through all this and still not get a determination,” Walsh said.

“Parking is really a primary reason,” Williford said, when discussing the obstacles to his advocacy efforts. Williford’s first effort was a successful counter-petition with 200 signatures to preserve a bikeshare station, after 200 signatories in his Hayes Valley neighborhood asked for the station to be moved uphill, away from local retail.

“Bikeshare stations allow people to get around without their cars, so I don’t believe it would actually reduce available parking,” Williford added.

While even recalcitrant public officials generally acknowledge that bikeshare systems can be beneficial, the nature of those benefits remains unclear. Ridehailing giant Lyft recently purchased Motivate, and Uber purchased the dockless bikeshare company JUMP, in an effort to shift their shortest trips from higher-cost car travel to bikes. After a trial period, Uber released data showing that JUMP bikes had replaced Uber trips to some extent after the service was integrated into the Uber app.

But what exactly is the relationship between bikeshare and personal automobile use? Even bikeshare advocates acknowledge that the benefit may be more of a long-term paradigm shift, rather than an immediate shift in transportation habits. Simply put: people won’t abandon their cars for bikes en masse until cycling  becomes far more convenient than driving.

“The people who bike in San Francisco are not representative of the City’s diversity, because biking is seen as unsafe,” Williford said. “The reason bikeshare is important for that is it lowers the barrier for people to feel comfortable biking…I think bikeshare is a tool to advocate for our city to reform its street design, so it’s not just focused around cars.”

Williford emphasized that wider adoption of bikeshare could build political will for more robust, safe bike and pedestrian infrastructure, but would hardly be a substitute for such improvements. And the research largely agrees.

In 2015, transportation scholar Miriam Ricci concluded that bikeshare systems increased rates of cycling but did not reduce traffic, as bikesharing “needs complementary pro-cycling measures and wider support to sustainable urban mobility to thrive.” A 2017 study by European scholars “found that many bikeshare systems throughout the world found that system expansions (increasing the number of stations and associated number of bicycles) do not increase system performance.” A 2014 study in Australia found that car convenience, not system expansion, was the greatest barrier to bikeshare adoption. Washington, D.C.-based activist Alex Baca summed up these results succinctly in a blog post: “It’s easier to expand a bikeshare system than it is to make our roads safer for walking and biking.” 

Williford is not alone in lamenting the apparent lack of diversity in cyclist advocacy. Demographic studies from Australia and North America found that bikeshare users skewed white, male, younger and higher-income than the general population. In her provocative 2016 book Bike Lanes Are White Lanes, University of Minnesota doctoral candidate Melody Hoffman described bikeshare as “one of the most inequitable forms of sustainable transportation infrastructure” based on her analysis of the NiceRide system rollout in Minneapolis. Her emphasis, too, was not on the concept of bikeshare itself, but on the inequitable distribution of safe road space and other amenities for cyclists. 

Advocates and scholars largely agree that bikeshare services can’t do much to change a city’s overall policy priorities. If a region’s transportation infrastructure remains inequitable at a deeper structural level, simply adding single-use bikes won’t radically change the equation. But, Our Bikes organizers contend, it can change the conversation.

“We've seen over 1 million trips and biking increase 10% near new bike share stations. However, bike share alone will not make San Francisco a truly bike-friendly city,” Williford acknowledged. “A network of protected bike lanes is required. Bike share and protected bike lanes work hand-in-hand to get many more people biking and meaningfully reduce automobile trips.” 

Correction: Williford's first petition was in Hayes Valley, not in the Mission, as previously stated.