You may have noticed that North Beach's only Bay Area Bike Share (BABS) station, located on the corner of Grant and Columbus avenues, has disappeared. But not to worry, the station filled with the ubiquitous blue bikes has moved down to Grant Avenue just south of Broadway.
Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz, outreach and communications manager with Motivate, the company that runs the bike share program, told us in an email that they were forced to move the station because the city has plans to repave the 1200 block of Grant Avenue. It's a small offshoot of the larger Columbus Avenue Safety Project, which will include bulb-outs at that intersection right next to where the bikes were previously located. We asked about the time frame for the repaving, and a spokesperson for Public Works told us the final schedule is being worked out with the contractor.
The former bike share location on Grant Avenue north of Columbus Avenue showing paint for the coming bulb-out.
The new location is only a block away, in front of Wells Fargo, but that might not be its final resting place. "We're currently looking for a more permanent location for that station while Grant is repaved, so the Grant and Broadway location is only temporary," he said.
Then again, the location could become permanent, Cosulich-Schwartz told us, if it proves to be more visible and more people use it. "We're likely to make the interim location permanent, so long as the neighborhood [and] businesses are OK with it," he said.
As we've previously reported, BABS announced "phase one" of a planned expansion to bring a total of 7,000 new bikes to the Bay Area, starting with the Castro and SoMa neighborhoods. But North Beach will have to wait for more, and it's not certain yet when it'll get more stations. "We'll be announcing our phasing schedule beyond this first wave shortly," Cosulich-Schwartz said, "but with North Beach so close to the existing service area, it's safe to assume we'll be looking at new stations in [the neighborhood] soon."
