The Civic Center BART station in San Francisco will see its bike parking more than triple next year after the BART board of directors allocated more than half a million dollars for the project at its meeting Thursday night.
The move to increase the station’s number of bike spaces from 63 to 216 is part of BART’s strategy to make the transit system more bike-friendly and encourage more people to bike to BART rather than drive, according to BART.
Eighty-nine of the new spaces will be in a paid BikeLink area, accessible to smart card holders, similar to the facilities in the Embarcadero and Ashby stations.
The 60 remaining spaces will be in a free area of the station next to the BikeLink area. It would be possible to merge these spaces into the BikeLink area in the future if there is demand for it, BART officials said.
BART will pay LC General Engineering Inc., $539,680 to construct the new bike facilities.
In the long term, BART plans to add 2,000 secure bike spaces at 18 stations. The agency changed its policy in October 2013 to allow bikes on trains at all hours as part of its mission to become more bike-friendly.
Drew Himmelstein, Bay City News
