Bike Valet and Service Facility Opens
A new, attended bicycle parking and service facility has officially opened in San Francisco. Warm Planet Bikes is a 1,600 square foot facility that provides free, secure bike parking for 130 bicycles, and is located at Caltrain’s San Francisco station. The station is the commuter rail line’s busiest in terms of the number of passengers. The bike facility provides repair services for a fee and also houses a retail store.
The facility is the result of six years of work by cycling advocates and local transportation agencies to help meet the demand of a growing number of multimodal commuters. Each Caltrain rail car has limited space for bikes, and cyclists sometimes have to wait for a train with room or leave their bikes behind. Caltrain statistics show that there were over 2,300 “bike boardings” (instances of a bicycle being taken aboard a train) on an average weekday in 2007. But the company has said that adding space on trains for bikes is not an option.
Kash is the person overseeing the operation of Warm Planet Bikes; he operated bicycle parking at public events for the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition for several years. He was asked why it took six years to complete the project. According to Kash, one reason is that big bureaucracies were involved, and changing their direction is a lengthy process. Another reason is that there was no existing model to follow and it took a lot of work to create a plan and assemble funding. Kash noted, “It’s difficult to get anything done for bikes. At the federal level, bicycles are not considered transportation. At the state level, they are sort of considered transportation. At the local level, well, we’re working on that.”
Transportation agencies funded construction of the building and provided seed money for the start-up and initial operation of the bike parking, but not for the retail operations. After the first three years, the entire facility must be entirely self-supporting. Kash points out that this is a departure from the existing model of continuing operating subsidies, which have been the sticking point for installing this type of bike facility in the past. “It is this self-reliance which is the really innovative part of the operating model and the one we hope to export to other transit agencies.”
Asked about the success of Warm Planet Bikes since its opening, Kash said, “We had a soft opening a couple months before the grand opening. Without any advertising whatsoever, just people walking by, we got up to 70 bikes per day. That’s mainly because Caltrain is such a perfect match for cyclists that the demand is really high and people get bumped from the trains.”
Kash points out that if the same per-passenger subsidy were allocated for cyclists as users of other modes of transportation, then there would be vastly more facilities for cyclists, which in turn would encourage more people to ride. He refers to the cost of providing parking lots at stations for the cars of people who drive there, and to the buses that feed the stations. Kash says that, for example, if 25 people chose to bike instead of taking a feeder bus, the amount of money saved by operating one less bus would be considerable.
“We are saving San Francisco money, but it doesn’t come into their calculations. I’m talking about any transit agency. It’s the same thing with transit agencies all over the country. Bicycle improvements aren’t counted towards the total transit policy.”
“If we [cyclists] got our fair share we could have staffed bike parking facilities at every major transit hub in the US.”
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