A Regional Bike Share System is Growing in the Bay Area

In October 2024, Redwood Bikeshare launched across five cities in Marin and Sonoma counties with more cities to come. 

Just north of San Francisco, across the Golden Gate Bridge, lie Sonoma and Marin County. With a combined population of about 740,000 people, many of whom commute into the city, the Greater San Francisco area is strengthening micromobility options for residents of this region.

Redwood Bikeshare is a two-year bike share pilot program overseen by Sonoma County Transportation Authority (SCTA) and Transportation Authority of Marin (TAM) alongside contractor Drop Mobility, which operates in more than 50 municipalities in 15 states. The pilot is funded by $826,000 in joint funding from the Metropolitan Transportation Commission given to the two county agencies to create a bike share system around the Sonoma-Marin Area Rail Transit (SMART) stations in both counties.

“It’s designed around a fairly new rail corridor,” says SCTA senior transportation planner Dana Turrey. “The vision is to provide another first- and last-mile transportation option between transit and origins and destinations and to provide other transportation options in the cities that we serve.”

With the region already so interconnected, shared micromobility is a clear way to bring the many existing transportation options together.

“The program connects to regional rail and regional ferry, with hubs around bus stops, SMART rail stations, and the Larkspur Ferry, connecting people to ferry services into San Francisco from Marin County,” says TAM principal transportation planner Scott McDonald.

The network plan for the pilot is a build-out of 60 hubs throughout seven cities. So far, 37 hubs have been deployed in five cities with the next two on the way in the coming weeks according to Drop Mobility Operations Manager for Redwood Bikeshare Marc Azevedo. These include Novato and Santa Rosa, where there will be hubs at two different college campuses.

What makes this system unique is that it operates as a hub-to-hub system rather than an open network system. Redwood Bikeshare describes hubs as “officially designated parking areas that are highlighted on the service area map in the Redwood Bikeshare app.” According to Azevedo, the SMART train system is the spine of the service area, radiating out into key destination areas in each city, such as areas where there is a concentration of jobs in a centralized location.

Because it’s a regional bike share system, each city is self-contained as far as operations go. Most bikes do not travel between cities during rebalancing unless two cities share a border, as is the case with Cotati and Rohnert Park.

Although Redwood Bikeshare is in its early days, they have seen a large portion of trips from monthly and equity pass members compared to single-ride trips. Once spring comes, the system plans to table at community events and conduct demonstrations on how the bike share system works. They also are building partnerships with local bike coalition groups for outreach events, including Bike East Bay, which received a BBSP mini-grant.

“We want to guide people into using the system, how to use it, how best to fit a helmet, and then how to ride and interact with traffic, how to ride throughout their neighborhoods, and from place to place,” says Azevedo. 

The equity membership is $5 a month while a normal monthly membership is $20. It includes unlimited, 30-minute trips with no unlock fee. The pay-as-you-go option is $1 to unlock, and then 25 cents per minute. To qualify for an equity membership with Redwood Bikeshare, you must be currently enrolled in Calfresh (SNAP Benefits) and/or Medicaid. A component of Redwood’s outreach will be connecting people who may qualify for this program to the system.

“Part of our planned outreach is to have these classes in neighborhoods where not everybody may have a car or access to transit or even know how the different transit options work and how Redwood Bikeshare might help get them to a bus stop or the SMART train so they could go to another town or another part of their town to find work or run errands,” says Azevedo.

For now, Redwood Bikeshare is expanding and using ridership data to better understand rider habits and needs as the system grows. Drop Mobility is tracking start and end location data to identify which hubs are most and least active to see how hub locations might be shifted over time to better serve the community. Turrey is hopeful the system will encourage individuals to switch their modes of travel from automobile to active transportation and transit, increasing transit usage overall and supporting the regional plan for better connectivity.

The Better Bike Share Partnership is funded by The JPB Foundation as a collaboration between the City of Philadelphia, the National Association of City Transportation Officials (NACTO), and the PeopleForBikes Foundation to build equitable and replicable bike share systems. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, or sign up for our weekly newsletter. Have a question or a story idea? Email odochi@peopleforbikes.org