Tag: bicycle

1) How Does Bay Area Bike Share Work?

You can join Bay Area Bike Share for a $88 annual pass, $22 three-day pass, or $9 for a 24-hour pass. Annual members get a fancy electronic key fob, and other members can just get a keycode from the bike station itself. Enter your keycode into the bike’s dock, pop out the bike, ride it some place fun, and then return it to that or another dock within 30 minutes. There’s a mobile app and website to help find an available bike or empty dock.

2) Where Will the New Bike Stations Be Located?

In this phase, the 750 new bikes will be distributed between Oakland, Berkeley, and Emeryville.  MTC will be conducting a public planning process to make sure the bike stations are located where people need them.

3) When Can I Get On A Bike?

It is anticipated that the bike stations could be on the street during the spring of 2015 . Look for a launch date to be announced later this year, which MTC is hinting could be before Bike to Work Day in May.

How Do I Learn More?

If you’re on Twitter, follow @SFBayBikeShare, @BikeEastBay or @MTCBATA for the latest. Or subscribe to our newsletter, which goes out every second Tuesday with the latest transportation news for Contra Costa County and the East Bay.

American transportation planners are fixated on getting more people on bikes, and it’s easy to see why. Bicycles offer a number of benefits, so much so that we have a “bike benefits” tag on this blog.

People using a bike to travel distances of up to 7.5 km, arrive on average faster than people travelling by a bus, tram, or subway as the main mode of transport. Distances up to 5 km travelled by car take on average 9 minutes, while travellers taking the bus, tram, or subway spend 23 minutes traversing this short distance.

Incredible, and given that most trips in America are under 5 miles, could the same be true in the Bay Area? Have you found bicycling to be a fast way of getting around for small trips here and there? Perhaps the relatively new Bay Area Bike Share (BABS) has helped you make trips during your lunch break that wouldn’t otherwise be possible?
Our commuter survey found that bike commutes average 7.5 miles in distance though we don’t have numbers on commute time. However, consider this, maybe the bicycle is faster – even for longer trips – when you take into account the full cost of driving.
Let us know, share your bicycling experience in the comments! Also, visit the Dutch Cyclists’ Union for a cool graph showing average time spent on travel by mode and distance length.

When a quarter of all trips within the entire country are done by bicycle it’s difficult to imagine much could be done to make cycling more attractive in the Netherlands. Then the municipality of Eindhoven unveiled it’s spectacular aerial roundabout for bikes that lets cyclists fly over motorized traffic.
More recently the city of Groningen – where almost 60% of all trips are by bicycle – yet another innovation has come about to make cycling even more attractive and convenient. It’s just a test at the moment, but the city is installing sensors at certain intersections that will change to give cyclists on bike paths green lights faster if it is snowing or raining. In a country infamous for its rain, cyclists may find themselves getting priority quite often! Also, by getting shorter wait times during inclement weather, cyclists are probably less likely to run red lights– thus this test is likely to improve safety as well.
Another attempt to make cycling more pleasant in times of harsh weather has been the idea to heat bike paths when it’s snowing. The purpose of this  is to reduce the need to salt and clear popular bike routes of snow as well as reduce the risk of people slipping and getting injured if a bike path is slick from being partially frozen.
Will The Bay Area Ever Be That Bike Friendly?
It may seem like cycling conditions could never be as good here as they are in The Netherlands, but keep in mind the Dutch haven’t always been bike friendly, they oriented their cities towards the automobile for a while too. Also, currently city officials from major San Jose and San Francisco are actually getting help from Dutch planners to make cycling more appealing. San Francisco in particular has seen great leaps in the levels of cycling in just the past five years despite its hilly topography. San Francisco has also pioneered the concept of the “green wave,” which synchronizes traffic lights to the speed of the bicycle rather than the automobile, on popular bike corridors to make cycling effortless. With Bay Area cities leading in bike commute rates nationally, it seems like we may well be on our way to someday see the levels of cycling that exist in The Netherlands; perhaps we should view this as a sign of encouragement to maximize the potential for cycling to be a viable form of transportation and help address our climate and traffic problems.

Have you ever been unsure whether you should bike or take public transit to work? You’re not alone! Richard Pope of London recently blogged about his most recent invention, the bicycle barometer, which tells him if he’s better off cycling, or taking the Tube to work. Richard Pope describes it like this:

“The bicycle barometer takes data about the weather, the status of the tube lines I use to get to work, and whether my local station is open or shut.
It then reduces all that data down to a single value and displays it on a dial with a bike sign at one end and a tube sign at the other.
For example, if it is raining a bit the dial will move a bit towards the tube sign, but if the tube is suffering delays, it will move a bit back in the other direction.
Different data points get different weightings. E.g. snow is more important than a bit of drizzle; the tube station being shut trumps everything.”

Here’s a short video of the bicycle barometer in action: