I was in San Francisco the last two days, and used the JUMP system to familiarize myself with the drop zones there, the ones marked as a green lightning bolt. First, the only drop zone with charging racks is at the Bluxome Street warehouse location, as it was before. The other eight drop zones are just regular bike racks, meant to accumulate bikes that have low batteries and are about to go into repair mode, so that they can be picked up more easily for recharging. A person at the Bluxome warehouse confirmed that the other drop zone hubs were not charging hubs, said they were planned to be eventually, but didn’t know when.

The credit for returning a low battery bike (with $ icon) to a drop zone is offered as ‘up to’ $6, and the two bikes I returned both earned that $6 credit. I’m rich! Well, rich in bike share credits.

And, to repeat what I’ve already said, the difference between 20 mph (SF) and 15 mph (Sacramento) is significant. At 20 mph, I can keep up with traffic on most streets. Of course having bike lanes and separated bikeways that are present on more and more streets in downtown, and lane splitting when necessary to avoid congestion, makes a huge difference as well. In afternoon rush hour traffic yesterday, I rode to two destinations that would have taken me about five times as long in a car, because the traffic was crawling, and sometimes not even that, and I was zooming. Bikes, and bike share!

I also did a single bike count, 3:00PM on Tuesday, and there were 162 bikes out of a possible 250 bikes available in San Francisco, an availability rate of 65%. It would be interesting to do more counts, but I don’t have the time.

It is hard to come back to Sacramento heat after two days in San Francisco cool.