San Francisco's Mission District pumps brakes on bikeshare program

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) -- Earlier this summer, a bikesharing program called GoBike rolled out around the Bay Area with much fanfare, but one San Francisco neighborhood is putting the brakes on the program.

Merchants in the Mission District are calling for a moratorium on the program.

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"Our biggest problem with it is they failed to engage, and simply sought to impose themselves upon the community without proper communication or proper collaboration," Carlos Bocanegra with La Raza Centro Legal said.

Motivate, the company that runs the program says it did outreach for two years with various community groups, and will continue to seek a solution that everyone can support.

The Mission has seen a lot of changes in recent years. Gentrification has pushed out long-time Latino residents. That's another reason some oppose GoBike, which they feel will bring in more outsiders. So far, at least 400 of the bikes in the neighborhood have been vandalized. The operator tells us that's not unusual for new ventures, and there are no plans to walk away from The Mission.

"If we were to remove stations from key areas including BART stations, we'd actually be doing the program and people who use it a disservice, so our goal is to find locations that do work," Paolo Cosulich-Schwartz with Motivate said.