Alameda bike shop opens BART stop

Oakland Tribune, Nov 16, 2004 by Susan McDonough, STAFF WRITER

ALAMEDA -- A local bike shop has opened a satellite store at the Fruitvale BART station, joining a small but growing network of BART bicycle baby sitters.

With $800,000 in grants from Caltrans and the Bay Area Quality Management District, among others, Alameda Bicycle opened the Fruitvale bike station in the Fruitvale Village Plaza on Nov. 1, offering supervised bike parking and a full-service repair and retail shop for commuters.

With space for more than 200 bikes, the Fruitvale bike station is the largest on the BART map and the second largest in the nation, said Laura Timothy, who manages BART's bicycle program.

The BART Bicycle Task Force was created to encourage passengers to either walk or ride to BART stations, reducing the cost of providing parking, while the bike stations keep bicycle congestion off trains.

"It is economically and environmentally a good idea," Timothy said. BART has offered free supervised bike parking at its downtown Berkeley station since 1999 and at the Embarcadero station in San Francisco since last year.

The popular Berkeley bike station is run by the Bicycle-Friendly Berkeley Coalition and has operated near or at capacity since it

opened in October 1999 with room for about 70 bikes.

The Embarcadero station opened in June 2003 and was run by private bicycle shop Mike's Bike until October of this year, when Long Beach- based Bikestation took over.

Neither include an on-site repair shop or have the range of bike parts and accessories that Alameda Bicycle owner Gene Oh plans to sell at his Fruitvale shop.

Budget cuts have forced BART to reduce the hours bikes are supervised by attendants at the Embarcadero and Berkeley locations, Timothy said.

Bikestation, which runs transit-related shops in Seattle and Long Beach is experimenting with electron-

ically secure self-serve parking during off hours, said the nonprofit's executive director, Andrea White.

Oh's plan is for the Fruitvale bike station to be self-sustaining in a few years, he said.

Until then, the Caltrans money will keep the doors open.

Oh said he originally planned to merely consult on the Fruitvale station shop but was later asked to run the store, which opened in a storefront owned by Fruitvale Plaza developer The Unity Council, another partner in the project.

"It's a labor of love," Oh said. "We want this to work for our customers."

Many of his customers have had bikes stolen at a BART station, he said.

The Fruitvale station experiences an average of about 18 bike thefts a year, Timothy said. Among the BART system's 40 or so stops, stations range from zero thefts at some to a high of about 56 a year at others, she said.

Contact Susan McDonough at smcdonough@angnewspapers.com .