So the first attempt at a bike-share plan failed because less than one person used the service on a daily basis. Well our brilliant city council votes to bring in up to 700 smart bikes equipped with GPS systems. That'll solve it.

When will they get it? This isn't Europe. I know they want to see everyone riding around with baguettes, some cheese and a bottle of wine in their bike baskets, but it ain't gonna happen. Why don't they fix the pot holes in the streets instead and get rid of the neighborhood road blocks that create traffic gridlock?

This is another example of the Council's unrealistic obsession with making Palo Alto a "biking city." As long as we have commuters to work, seniors who need transportation, handicapped persons and the need for short local trips involving carrying goods(shopping, etc.) we will have cars. Whether or not they are self-driving, we will have cars. Cars need parking near offices and businesses. Shopping centers thrive in part because of available parking. The rapid turnover of businensses in downtown ia a "tribute" yto the lack of parking. The failure of the bike-share plan is not due to ownership by the city. It's due to the fact that bikers usually own their bikes and others don't want to bike (or can't).
Choking traffic by road diets has simply shifted the cross-town traffic problem to residential streets.
We need to be realistic about biking. Provide for car transport to be here for the long term by constructing adequate parking ... no exceptions, and by building high rise housing along the rail and bus corridors. For example, both sides of our rail corridor should be rezoned for high rise residential buildings that require walking paths to rail stations,limit car ownership to one car per resident unit,and prohibit overnight street parking for several blocks around the housing area.

How many parking spaces will these bikes take up? Will they use street parking in front of people's homes? Other Cities are having these problems where folks can no longer park in front of their homes because the bikes stations pop up with little to no notice. Parking is already impossible in this City and bikes won't solve the problem. More parking garages need to be built. When companies build new buildings they should have to provide adequate parking for customers as well as employees.

If you travel, you will see tons of these bike littering the sidewalks in the world. They are mostly abandoned and the bike companies had reinvested the "deposits" so that are not really interested in the outcomes and care of the bikes. Hopefully Palo Alto will limit the number of bikes, limit the deposits that these companies take from the well intentioned riders and come up with a plan to remove the bikes if they are discarded in the wrong place. Currently in downtown Palo Alto - how many of us see abandoned Google Bicycles - the distinct colouring on those bikes prove that there is a problem. Here is an interesting article on the problem in China Web Link

I am not completely against the idea because I have seen it work and been used in other places outside the popular tourist hangouts.

However, ease of use is essential. These bikes need to be available in neighborhoods and popular destinations such as parks and movie theaters.

For example, we had house guests this past summer who didn't have a car. We had on occasions to drive them to the Caltrain station, to the movie theater at Shoreline, to Stanford Shopping Center, to San Antonio shopping center and Castro Street. If these guests had been able to rent a bike within a 1/4 mile of my home and ride the bike to any of these destinations they would have been able to do that independently of our family.



Likewise, anyone in the family with a bike problem (often) could have used a bike to get to school or the station if there had been a bike station close by.

The powers that be must ask who is likely to use these bikes and how, and then provide a service that meets the criteria. Having to keep the bikes within Palo Alto and only available for rent at stations and downtown is not likely to get much use.

PAForward has declared bicycle use a religion so it becomes impossible to criticize it. Like other religions, facts and data are irrelevant.

But here goes anyway:
In theory bicycle use is a good thing and we have ridden them. BUT with our overpopulation, our huge traffic problems, and parking shortages,
bikes are a hazzard, not a solution.
They make driving dangerous. And unpleasant.
At night they are a clear danger. Those bright lights blind you.

Developers, architects, and PAForward promote bikes so they can build without having to construct parking.
Apologies to religionists for introducing reality here.

I think its a very good thing that the City promotes biking. I'm a Palo Alto resident and, like many others, do almost all my local shopping and commuting on my bike. There are several places where the bike racks are often overcrowded, especially at Whole Foods and Trader Joes. It will be pretty annoying if rental bikes are left in the bike racks and there is even less space for local folks with their own bikes. I wonder if the City will be able to help mitigate the problem.

For bike-sharing to work with significant usage, a city has to have a sufficiently dense population that most people are near the bike stations. Palo Alto is spread out -- suburban -- and the average distance from your home to a bike station will require a long walk, perhaps 10 to 15 minutes. Each way. That is not practical for getting people to use these bikes.

If Palo Alto is serious about increasing bicycle usage, we need to provide more and better bicycle stands to lock up our own bicycles. These should be near all commercial areas, and should allow you to secure your bicycle (frame and both wheels) with a single U-lock. Installing 500 of these might cost $200K. Why are we not doing this?

What is the role of government if not to protect its people from exploitation?

Why are these bike sharing companies so unexpectedly profitable? Data.

Council members should be concerned about privacy. If you look at the detailed terms of use that are sometimes included on the bike company websites, they won’t rule out the possibly of tracking people even when they are not using the bike.They sometimes say they explicitly reserve the right to sell the data to third parties...

I am sure this is part of the regulatory framework the City is creating, yes?

Ad how much altogether (including consultants) has the city spent on their various bike sharing programs?

Yet we don't have a single dedicated traffic safety officer and red lights, speed limits, stop signs, are ignored with impunity.

Yes -- the City needs to enforce our traffic laws and slow down the traffic in our neighborhoods. Riding my bike all over PA (and to MP and MV sometimes) is great -- I don't have to circle around trying to find parking and I pass lots of backed up cars and go straight to the red light. I also reduce pollution, get my exercise and save money. Try it sometime, you'll like it. If you're mostly driving around PA, you'll have much more fun on a bike.

As usual, immediately a lot of negativity and why this can't work. Why not just let some companies try. Citibike in NYC works pretty well. Still some problems and we may not be dense enough to work here. But that and how the company handles the region is there investors problem.

The main argument I see in this forum is that bikes will be left all over the place.
Solution - Bike companies must have each bike clearly identified and either Palo Alto can pick them up and charge the company a substantial fee. Or leave them in place and start charging the offending company ongoing fees per day.
Companies can take credit card deposits and make it clear to riders that they must return a bike to one of the stations or pay these fees plus a percentage from their credit card. Would you just abandon a bike if it would cost you a lot?
Also, what am I missing? If I leave my bike unsecured in a public place it will be quickly stolen. Why aren't discarded bikes simply stolen?

Biking in Palo Alto is not safe. How about waiting until PACC installs some walled off/segregated bike paths (that are not in the bay lands) and people begin to say "You know, PA is a great place to ride!"... and then invite the bike sharing services.

Because right now, it's going to fail again. Because biking in PA is lousy.

How about that underpass near Whole Foods that dumps you into wrong way traffic?! Love that one.

I wonder how much time city time was spent on this?

The winter is here and I am dreading seeing bicyclists with no reflective anything and no lights, wearing dark clothing blending with the darkness, staring at their smartphones, their ears plugged with earphones, unaware of their surroundings ...
I am afraid that one of these days I will hit one ...

You see, everyone else is supposed to ride bikes, so the city council members can find parking spaces for their own cars.

Founder Of Chinese Bike Sharing Firm Bluegogo Fled, Millions Of User Deposits At Risk: Web Link

On the one hand I'm all in favor of helping to increase bicycle ridership. The more people who ride the better off we'll all be in a number of ways, including safety.

On the other hand it's hard to see why a bike share program is the best way to increase ridership. Other projects, like bike lane improvements, better enforcement of automotive speed limits, and finishing bike bridges and underpasses, should be much higher priority. I don't see Palo Alto as a city where a bike share program is likely to succeed.

On the third hand, the article makes it clear that this isn't a big city initiative. It's a program to "allow various bike-share companies to bring their services to local streets with little city involvement." Given that, why not give it a try? If private companies want to risk their money on for-profit bike rental in Palo Alto, let's get out of their way and let them. If I'm right and this ends up fizzling, no harm done. If I'm wrong, if bike-share takes off and these companies end up being successful, then so much the better.

For the love of god, stop.with.the.bicycle.worship.already

This is a delusion that the city government doesn't even question. It's a foregone conclusion to them that bikes=good and cars=bad. They can't see beyond this simplistic, collectivist groupthink and justify blowing vast amounts of resources on failed "bike-incentivizing" experiments. It is so wasteful.

To me, a bicycle is a slow and primitive form of transportation that should amount to nothing more than a hobby. We should be free of coercion to use one form of transportation over another.

Its unfortunate that those with the power of taxation have such a myopic view of reality.

Dear 38 year resident,

Forget about the potholes!

Obviously, the answer is to provide all bike riders with "baguettes, some cheese and a bottle of wine".

@ Garden Gnome...you just made my day. LOL !!!

Enjoy the traffic haters. Thanks for the snacks! Haha :)

The shift to GPS-enabled smart bikes could make a real difference for adoption. Let's give it a try! One suggestion is for these companies to actively recruit riders -- maybe a free trip, and some sign-up / info tables around town / at local events. (Bay Area Bike Share could have benefitted from some form of in-person explanation of how it worked.) Oh, and while we're at it, let's improve the existing biking infrastructure -- more bike parking at popular destinations (supermarkets), and ways to reduce theft / vandalism at Caltrain bike parking.

Palo Alto’s Transportation Department needs to be reined in. They are wasting millions of taxpayer dollars on foolish, dangerous, traffic gridlock creating bicycle projects. The department is making traffic worse for the residents. Transportation Director Josh Mello obviously has a bottomless budget and he is squandering it on bike projects that will be a failure and will be quietly ripped up within five years. The city streets look like a carnival. Time to drain the city swamp.

Cyclists frequently ride two to four abreast along city streets. The majority of the cyclists NEVER stop at stop signs. The student riders are texting and talking on their phones as they ride along city streets. You can’t ride a bike when going to the grocery store, cleaners, picking up small children or if you are an older infdividual. The small but vocal bike lobby has hijacked Palo Alto.

So I have figured it out. Why is the CC so hot on bikes? The CC is pro-development and wants to build stack and packs without parking. If they can argue everyone rides a bike then the developers can build stuff car-lite. Yes, more millions for the developers. All those car-lite developments will have their cars parked in front of the R1 residences on the street.

Midtown,

You are correct. If you scratch not too far below the surface you will find EVERYTHING the PACC does is a thinly disguised handout for the real-estate development industry.

EVERYTHING the PACC does is a thinly disguised handout for the real-estate development industry.

More accurately, "EVERYTHING the PACC MAJORITY does."

Greg Scharff, Liz Kniss, Cory Wolbach, Adrian Fine, Greg Tanaka,

I agree. It's funny - Kniss and Scharff are just blatently working for the developers; Wolbach and Fine are on some "we must help the young take from the old" mission, but the developers are delighted to help them along; and Tanaka, who knows what he is thinking.

But it is funny that Kniss and Scharff are basically just sell-outs, but get elected anyway since they've been at it so long and their names are well known.

This is a good development.

Palo Alto was ill-suited for "bike- dependent" bike sharing (which was previously tried). There are simply not enough dense areas in Palo Alto where destination docks would be used consistently. Plenty of people get on and off of Caltrain carrying a bike, so clearly there is demand for a bicycle as a last mile solution. However, the previous iteration of the system didn't permit people to go anywhere useful with a bike.

The new system completely changes this dynamic... the bikes have a flexible destination (they don't have to be parked in docks) and range. The most obvious use case is Stanford: how many people would get off at Caltrain, and ride the 1.1 miles to central campus, rather than walking or waiting for a Marguerite shuttle? I suspect that we're about to start seeing a lot of these bikes all over campus.

Similarly, how many students would come to downtown Palo Alto if they didn't have to worry about getting their bikes stolen?

The dockless nature of the program definitely leads to other challenges (bikes illegally parked all over the sidewalks, for example). However, provided we can help solve this problem, the dockless design enables a successful network.

@Eric, I'm missing your logic when you say "Similarly, how many students would come to downtown Palo Alto if they didn't have to worry about getting their bikes stolen?"

Why wouldn't these $3300 bikes we're providing also get stolen? There have been lots of articles about the problems with stolen, lost and/or simply discarded bikes from Google and elsewhere.

Are we that rich that we can afford to waste all this money?

How about instead working to prevent bike thieves in the first place?

@online name

"we" aren't buying any bikes (ie., Palo Alto doesn't pay for this). 3rd party companies are providing the bikes. Their business model is charging a fee per ride (usually ~$1/hour... see Web Link for an example of one of these companies).

This model has a significant effect on thievery. These bikes are simply not stolen (they are extremely heavy, go relatively slowly, and are GPS enabled). There is literally no resale value. Destruction or vandalism is probably a problem, though.

@online name

"Why wouldn't these $3300 bikes we're providing also get stolen?"

I'm a bit confused by this question? Are you reading this article or something else?

To summarize:
1) this program doesn't cost Palo Alto anything
2) the cost-per-bike isn't mentioned in this article (although it's not super relevant... again, we're not paying)
3) theft of bikes should go way down. These bikes are totally different from Google bikes (which are light weight and more theft-attractive)

"Midtown Senior" probably hit the nail on the head: people have their own bikes. And if Eric R is correct and these bikes are heavier than the Google bikes, that might discourage ridership. When I have considered using a shared bike I have been deterred by the access process and concluded that it wasn't worth it for a ride or two. Is it possible to have a quick-use system similar to the parking meters in SF so that borrowers can quickly swipe their payment card and ride away?

Palo Alto is pretty bicycle friendly as is although sometimes bicycling feels perilous. I've told my family that if I ever don't make it home, they should look for me on campus. At dusk during the commute hour, campus cycling can be a gnarly experience, especially with how the new roundabouts funnel bicyclists into the same lane as autos. Even so, I am glad I can still bike b/c it beats the heck out of driving around town.

@Bike Lobby: You can’t ride a bike when going to the grocery store, cleaners, picking up small children or if you are an older infdividual.

Tell that to the Whole Foods customers fitting a bag of groceries in a basket, the Addison parents picking up their children with child seats, and the elderly women parking their bicycles in front of Reach gym. Heck, you can bicycle with a newborn if you kludge a baby car seat into a bike trailer.

The bicyclists shot themselves in the foot twenty years ago when they drank the developer cool-aid and foolishly started believing a denser Palo Alto would be a more bike-friendly Palo Alto.

Density has unintended consequences. The congestion that accompanies density makes it unsafe for bicyclists to share the roads with motor vehicles. Density and its evil Siamese twin congestion are destroying bike-able infrastructure 10x faster than Palo Alto's developer corrupted government can create it.

No amount of bike-only infrastructure construction will ever makeup for the loss of bike-safe streets. The hippy dream of a bicycle utopia in Palo Alto is dying from a self-inflicted wound.

I get around totally fine in Palo Alto on my bike. I've been doing it for about 30 years so tat may come into play, but I feel very safe when I ride through PA, with the rare exception of coming across a lunatic driver now and then(rare though)

I think the above poster is taking great liberties with reality to craft his opinion. PA is a great place to bike...has been for decades IMO and only seems to be getting better.
It's a terrible town to drive in though.

Redwood City had a couple of those "bike scam" stations and I personally witnessed (at the Caltrain station) how day after day, for years, not a single one of those bikes ever even moved. ZERO usage. MASSIVE gravy train payments (via MTC and the City) for the infrastructure and to the "Motivate" company who ran the show. The entire project was a rip-off, probably with falsified statistics to sell it in the first place.

We really need a formal investigation of that entire project -- and of all the similar, spectacular boondoggle failures in other cities, like PA.

We need to completely pull the plug on any and all similar projects that take the label "public-private partnerships". Translation: the public pays, and the private partners wallow in gravy with no motivation whatever to deliver a working solution.

Interestingly, The Guardian just did a report with SHOCKING photos about China's lack of demand for their bike share program.
As was mentioned in another thread, Asians and Indians come to America to drive cars on our nice roads, not ride bikes. Conservation was not instilled into their way of thinking during childhood. And we will need to think about this when we plan programs, and housing since our demographics are changing.

Additionally, bikes expose one's skin to the sun, and the darker or more freckled your complexion, the "lower class" one might appear.
It's a cultural thing.
Owning and driving a car is a state of status to people coming from developing countries.

These peoples parents and grandparents rode bikes, and took buses. Most will not never use public transit. It is too dirty with "our germs".
Here is the article and SHOCKING photos from the Nov 24th Guardian Paper:

"Chinese bike share graveyard a monument to industry's 'arrogance'
Future of dockless bicycles under a cloud amid concerns there are too many bikes and not enough demand".

Web Link

Resident ... thank you for exposing the international concerns. Outraged in RWC ... you are 100% right, we really need a formal investigation of that entire project. "Scam" is an understatement. Shut them down!

As environmentally nice of an idea it may be to have bike share program, I'm afraid it will be a waste of time and money.
Demographics have changed, and biking is not what people want.
The mountain of unwanted discarded bikes in China attest to this.
Cycling is not popular in developing countries.
too dangerous - too dirty - too much sun exposure.
America is portrayed on television in their countries as a place with great open roads. They want to drive.

As all the people with eyes know, the number of cyclists over the past 20 years has exploded around here. Bike share or not.

I guess things are different in China where nobody rides a bike,...what?!?! hahaha.
Obviously they don't do bike share in China but I can promise you, they ride the hell out of every pedaled contraption you could imagine. Picture pedal powered delivery trucks. If it can be pedaled, it's on the road in Beijing.