This summer, San Francisco will launch the first regional bicycle sharing program. The city is eager to work with your companies to roll-out this exciting new initiative to deploy 500 commuter-style bikes at 50 stations in downtown San Francisco. The SF bike-sharing program will promote bicycles for short trips and as a first- and last-mile transportation alternative for commuters and residents taking all forms of transit, thereby reducing greenhouse gas emissions from vehicle use and improving local air quality. Bike share trips also provide an increase in accessibility to transit services, user cost savings, travel time savings, congestion reductions, relief on over-capacity transit lines, and improved public health.

On February 21, BC3 members, SF MTA, Genentech, Salesforce.com, and the SF Bicycle Coalition collaborated to host an event on how companies can participate in the city's bike-share program, including: 

• The inside scoop on the program’s roll-out and how you can get a bike-sharing stall located in a privately owned public open space  (POPOS) near your company from SFMTA's Heath Maddox;
  
• How you can get bikes to work by learning from Genentech’s successful internal bike-sharing program from Genentech's Nate Byerly, including overcoming legal and safety hurdles, securing vendors and installing infrastructure, and how employees are benefiting from the program.
• How companies can participate in the SF Bike-share program: through upcoming sponsorship opportunities and by creating internal bike-share programs for their employees.

During the Q&A, speakers answered questions related to how the city is making streets safer for bicycles, the ideal saturation point for bike-stall location (target: ~ every 300 meters), how the bike-share program is being incorporated into the city's strategic climate planning, and - most importantly - when information on corporate sponsorship will be released (soon).

SPEAKERS
Heath Maddox, Senior Planner, Livable Streets, SF Municipal Transportation Agency
Nate Byerly, gRide Outreach Manager, Genentech, Inc.
Kit Hodge, Deputy Director, SF Bicycle Coalition (Moderator)