Early this morning, Peter Colijn picked up a Bay Area Bike Share bike from the Civic Center station in San Francisco and biked 47 miles to Mountain View.
He began at 5:30 this morning and rode the SF2G Skyline Route. Peter reports the seven speeds in the internally geared hub provide sufficient range to allow him to climb the 2000+ feet of elevation gain with ease and suggests a Tunitas ride on a BABS bike might be in store soon.
“There were a few puzzled/incredulous/awestruck (in that order) looks from other riders,” reports one of the riders who accompanied / heckled Colijn on this ride.
Perhaps the most important discovery: “And you can’t dock them in another city. We tried docking it at MTV Caltrain and it just wouldn’t go in.”
Anyone who would like to replicate this feat should remember overtime fees are significant. Four hours with a BABS bike will run you $52 in fees.
Photo courtesy R Samuel Klatchko. H/T to Murph for the heads up on this.
Interesting. I’ve checked out bikes in Palo Alto and returned them in Mountain View with no problems.
Good to know; thanks for that datapoint. I know there was an extra bike floating around in Redwood City too for a couple of days (50 bikes allocated there, but they had 51 bikes docked there). Maybe it’s unique to San Francisco bikes?
According to the How It Works page, you can return a bike to any station *in your service area* but there’s no definition of which cities are in which service areas.
I had a flight to Denver and took a bus to get to Boulder, but considered riding a B-cycle share bike between the two for funzies (understanding the costs), but it said that you could not return a bike to the other city. 🙁
The infamous Denver SkyRide with one hour headways. I hope you didn’t get stuck on one of the painfully slow ABA non-express routes.
BABS has changed their FAQ. http://bayareabikeshare.com/faq
“All San Francisco bicycles must stay within San Francisco. However, members may use non-San Francisco Bay Area Bike Share bicycles to travel to other cities that are part of the Bay Area Bike Share network.”