BART board yields on bikeshare dock
A new bikeshare station originally planned for the 24th Mission Street BART Plaza will instead be installed at a nearby library, a move that transit officials hoped would quell outcry that the bikes symbolize gentrification.
Board director Bevan Dufty, who made the motion at Thursday’s board meeting, said the Mission Branch Library on Bartlett Street is 100 steps from BART — a fitting compromise, he said, between commuters who want to use the bikes and activists who see them as a corporate intrusion.
Dufty’s motion carried 5-3, over objections from colleagues who said the new location makes the bikes less accessible — an argument that Dufty called “dishonest.”
He said the board’s decision “validates the Mission’s concerns” that Motivate — the company that operates the docked Ford GoBikes in San Francisco and other cities — “has not effectively or respectfully worked with the Latino community.”
Supporters of the bikes were disappointed that a transit decision had been subsumed by a neighborhood culture war.
“You’re in the transit business,” said Gillian Gillett, a Caltrain board director who lives at Cesar Chavez and Guerrero streets, not far from the 24th Street Station.
She and others stressed the importance of seamless connections between modes of public transit, to discourage people from using private car services like Uber and Lyft.
“We would never make a bus stop a block away” from
BART, Gillett said. Yet others criticized the Ford GoBikes, seeing them as a product designed for well-heeled newcomers who have flocked to the Mission during San Francisco’s tech boom. Once a working-class Latino stronghold, the neighborhood is now freckled with wine bars and Michelinstarred restaurants.
“This battle is about community space,” said Vicky Castro, one of several speakers who described the 24th Street Mission Plaza as a community hub for buskers, protests and vendors who set up booths during Carnaval or the annual Dia de los Muertos celebration. Ford GoBike has caused battles to flare up on both sides of the bay. Opponents have thrown the jaunty blue twowheelers into Oakland’s Lake Merritt, slashed tires at docks near Dolores Park in San Francisco and on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland, and even set bikes on fire.
Yet the bicycles are also a popular “last mile” solution for people making the final leg of a journey from a BART stop, said Jean Walsh, director of external affairs for Motivate.
She said that 16,000 people have signed up for a GoBike membership throughout the Bay Area, and that the company needs 30 docked bikes near 24th and Mission streets to reliably serve BART riders.
“A bikeshare works best when there is a dense network of bicycles and docks” near a transit node, she said. The library location has room for only 15 bike docks — half of what Motivate's statistical models recommend to meet demand.
Walsh told The Chronicle she spoke with vendors and merchants around the plaza several times before Thursday’s board vote, and that no one seemed bothered by the proposed bike dock.
BART will need to revisit its decision when the library undergoes a major retrofit some time in the next two years.