Riding in San Francisco

As you may have read in my previous post, this week is a Rest Week, as I have been attending Cisco Live in San Francisco.  San Francisco is a city seemingly full of cyclists, every time I stepped out of the hotel or conference center  I would see cyclists going about their business, whether that be commuting, shopping just simply getting from A to B as efficiently as possible.

In fact cycling is so popular that they have installed automated bike counters on some routes such as this one on Market Street.This picture was taken on Tuesday evening at approx. 6pm, the daily bike count was at 2357, what may not be clear though is that so far this year almost 300,000 cyclists have ridden past this counter.  This in my opinion is a huge number, which reflects positively on San Francisco's efforts to incorporate cycling into it transport infrastructure and the positive cycling culture of the city.

Having all this cycling going on all around me really gave me the itch to ride, so on Wednesday I took the plunge and took out a 24 hour membership to use the Bay Area Bike Share program.  Some may say the cost for a single day is relatively expensive but given the ease of use and getting around and also the cost of alternate transport such as taxi's the $9 fee is pretty reasonable.  For this I was able to get unlimited bike rentals during the 24 hour period for up to 30 minutes each. Any rental over 30 minutes do incur additional fees, the rational though is to encourage shorter trip use, say when you need to get from your hotel to the conference center as I needed to do. In downtown San Fran there are numerous bike rental pickup and drop off locations, in fact the hotel I was staying at was 1 block from a rental location and the conference center had one basically on site.

Convenient!

I made use of the bikes 3 times during the 24 hours, maybe riding a mile or so each time. Not far by my normal standard but way cheaper than taking a taxi, quicker than walking and better for me and the environment.  I would certainly recommend this as a way to move around San Francisco and will use this scheme and other similar schemes that have sprung up in other cities around the world when the opportunity presents.

Now back to the real matter in hand, training & prep for LEJOG, only 20 days away!