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Where would you put bike-share stations in Venice and Pasadena?
FILE: Bicycles are lined up in downtown Los Angeles before the launch of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority bike share program on July 7, 2016.
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Meghan McCarty/KPCC
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Where would you put bike-share stations in Venice and Pasadena?
As the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Agency seeks to further expand its bike-share system, the agency is asking for public suggestions on where the bikes should be stationed.
Metro launched the largest bike-share system in the county in downtown L.A. in July. The agency has announced plans to expand the system to Pasadena and Venice by summer 2017 and the San Pedro area after that.
Metro is now asking the public to weigh in on its website about the possible locations for bike stations in Pasadena and Venice. The agency will be taking feedback until Friday, January 6.
An initial proposal for Pasadena called for around 400 bikes at 30 stations. Most of those were clustered around Old Town, with only a few in residential areas above the 210 freeway and none in the eastern part of the city.
Blair Miller, a local bike advocate with the Pasadena Complete Streets Coalition, said it makes sense to concentrate the stations in busy areas and near transit, but she hopes to someday to see the system expand to more residential areas.
"Part of the problem is either getting from your home or your work to that transit connection," she said.
Metro has marketed bike sharing as a potential solution to bridge the so-called "first and last mile" distance between a person's home or work and transit.
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But Miller said in order for a system to gain enough riders to be viable in the long-term, it's most important to place stations in close proximity to one another in areas with the densest concentration of people, which would favor downtown areas.
"There can be a tension between this first mile/last mile goal for the program, and the concentration needed to make the system work," she said. But she hopes as bike sharing become more popular it can be expanded to serve less concentrated areas, too.
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