Bikestation: Berkeley

[intro music]

Dave Campbell: [00:09] Hey, welcome to the Berkeley Bikestation, a free attended bike parking facility here in Downtown Berkeley. Now to check your bike with us we’re going to give you a claim check that looks like this. You’ll keep that with you when you come back. This claim check will be with your bike and your bike will be ready for you, safe and sound. It’s free. No charge. We can also repair your bike, if there’s anything wrong with your bike we can get it fixed while you’re away. And we got some accessories to sell, if you need a new lock or some lights, new helmet, we can get you set up with that as well. If you can pan back you’ll see this huge cage like structure here. We’re down inside the BART Station, we’re down on the concourse level, one level below the street. And, so cyclists using this either to use the train or just to visit Downtown Berkeley, come down one level of stairs to this facility here. Well if you come on in, we are the little bike station that could… we can park about 70 bikes in the spaces that we have and another 30 or so bikes we can accommodate either hanging them from the ceilings or just putting them in the aisle right here. Our record day I think was about 120 bikes. A fully operational bike station would be able to park two or three hundred or more bikes a day, like the bike stations in Europe. And that’s our plan here is to take this cage and expand it into the space around here, this unused space and create a very large bike station that can park several hundred bikes everyday. We recently got this rack added in here, so another 20 bikes can park out here. Customers like that because we’re kind of watching the bikes while we’re here. And when we’re not here, the bikes are a little more vulnerable. But it’s useful for customers who get here before we open up or who are coming back after we close down. We do open at 7am in the morning and close at 9pm at night, so we’re open a lot of hours. The Berkeley Bikestation has been operating since 1999. We were the third bike station to go online in the United States. And now there’s several more. There’s one at the Embarcadero Station in Downtown San Francisco, and there are more coming online really throughout the country now, Washington DC, Santa Barbara, California. Chicago has a bike station. They’re spreading out nationally and that’s a great thing.

[music]