Bay Wheels - no parking/drop off spot for e-bike

This is a post in the series on my commute from the Mission district in San Francisco to downtown Mountain View. See links to more posts in this series at the end of the post.

Before I leave my home in the San Francisco mission district to grab a Bay Wheels bike to the 22nd street Caltrain station, I usually check in the app to see if/where e-bikes are available. I’m lucky to be close to a few Bay Wheels locations, so there is typically one or more e-bikes either on Valencia and 22nd, or on Dolores and 22nd.

But on getting to the 22nd street Caltrain station today I for the first time couldn’t find any open slots to park my bike. It was completely packed! 😬

pic of bikes

So I drove to the nearest other Bay Wheels location, which is on 23rd and Tennessee, which you can see as an extra wiggle at the end of my ride here:

the route I took this morning, with an extra wiggle at the end

I had to run to make my train, as this in total added over 10 minutes to my home-to-station trip.

On the plus side, since this was a new Bay Wheels station for me, their app told me that I’ve now used almost 2% of their San Francisco locations.

Hmm… as I was browing the Bay Wheels site just now, I spotted this interesting line in their “How it works” page:

Ebikes can be parked at public racks for an additional $2.

Does that mean that I could’ve just dropped the bike off anywhere? How would that even work?

I decided to search further and then found this Passes & memberships help page that says:

Our new, silver next-gen ebike can only be docked at Bay Wheels stations… Our original black ebike is hybrid and allows you to dock at any Bay Wheels station or use the cable to lock to any bike rack within the service area.

That contradicts the statement on the earlier page for about half of the Bay Wheels e-bikes, doesn’t it? I wish that everything (but especially the main “How it works” page) wasn’t just friendly and easy to read, but also covered such basic information consistently. For now, I’ll assume the second page has it right, and I[‘ll have to run again if/when this happens again. 🏃⏱️🥵

Do you have experience with having to go out or your way for a drop-off spot? Or want to share how you deal with full/empty Bay Wheels locations? Sound off in socials with the links at the top! 👆

Also see my other commuter stories:

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