Title
Review Station-less Bike Share Program (Information)
Body
Transportation Commission
Date of Meeting (09/27/2017)
Item #5C
(INFORMATION)
Review Station-less Bike Share Program (Information)
Background
Bike share is a rapidly expanding and constantly evolving new transportation option used around the U.S. and world that provides a network of bicycles that can be checked out for a fee. Bicycles are typically used for short trips to connect to and from transit (i.e. "last mile" connections) and major commercial, employment and tourist destinations. In late 2016, the City had a Bike Share Feasibility Study prepared in response to a City Council referral, interest from the business community and a pending Metropolitan Transportation Commission (MTC) regional grant program for bike share capital costs. At that time, it was also known that the regional "Bay Area Bike Share" program would be dramatically expanding from 700 to 7,000 bicycles with networks for the first time in three East Bay cities (Oakland, Berkeley and Emeryville). That expansion has now been initiated, with the Ford GoBike system.
The development of the Feasibility Study and a Letter of Interest for the MTC grant program guided staff in considering and rejecting the idea of pursuing implementation of a full-scale, docking bike share system in Alameda. Such a system would require significant capital and annual operating expenses, plus staff time to establish. While Alameda could become a part of the Ford GoBike system, the costs of joining this system, as set in a contract between MTC and the private owner/operator (Motivate), are higher than other more flexible systems. Although the MTC grant would have covered most of the capital costs, it would still require the City to invest $100-250,000 annually for operations and maintenance costs even for the more flexible, less-infrastructure intensive systems studied at that time.
In November 2016, staff brought the Transportation Commission t...
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