Bike share vandals risking riders’ lives
Not an OK way to protest perceived gentrification
Wendy Wheeler rides a Ford GoBike from her Rockridge home to her office in downtown Oakland every day.
On Valentine’s Day, the ride almost turned deadly.
At around 7:30 a.m., Wheeler unlocked a bike from the docking station at Cavour Street and Shafter Avenue. She adjusted the seat and slung her bag into the front basket.
As Wheeler pedaled into the intersection, a car wheeled through a stop sign right in front of her.
Wheeler squeezed her brakes. Nothing. If she had been in the car’s lane, there would’ve been a collision. Shaken, Wheeler returned to the docking station for another bike.
“Come to find out, every single bike had the brakes broken,” she said. “It was a full rack. Every single bike.”
Even some tires had been slashed. Not cool. If this was someone’s idea of a protest, they took it way too far. Some people have seen the bike docks sprouting in neighborhoods as a symbol of gentrification since they were introduced to the Bay Area in July. There are no bikes east of High Street in East Oakland.
“You’re impacting potential rider safety and potentially life,” Wheeler, 50, said of the vandalism. “It’s one thing if you put graffiti on the GoBike, but the minute you touch that bike and you potentially risk somebody’s life, that’s taking things to a whole new level.”
Jean Walsh, spokeswoman for Motivate, which operates Ford GoBike, said the company now checks the station every morning.
“That is something that we take very seriously,” Walsh said. “We’re actually working with the Oakland Police Department and we’re taking active measures to make sure that never happens again.”
Not everyone likes the expanded Bay Area bike-share program.
Last summer in Oakland, someone tossed a Ford GoBike into Lake Merritt. In another incident, someone slashed the tires of bikes docked at Telegraph Avenue and 58th Street. In San Francisco, vandals gashed tires and hung a bike in a tree.
I thought the vandalizing thrill was gone.
It’s one thing to toss a bike into a lake or slash tires, because that’s repairable. Tampering with the braking mechanism, which is hidden in the bike’s aluminum frame, is going too far.
Attempted murder is an unacceptable form of protest.
Wheeler rides three miles to BART’s headquarters at the Kaiser Center on Lakeside Drive. She’s a division manager for computer systems engineering.
“The reason I ride the bikes is I know that there’s crowding at this station,” Wheeler said sipping a drink from Highwire Coffee Roasters as we sat outside of Market Hall on College Avenue as the Rockridge BART Station emptied.
“I just ride the bikes so other people have space on the trains. Having one less person getting on the train is a good thing.” Thank you, Wendy. Bike shares are convenient for people like Wheeler, who has lived in Rockridge for more than two decades. You don’t have to maintain the bike — or worry about it once you park it. As many Bay Area bike owners know, nothing — lights, panniers, tires, safety vests, entire bikes — is safe from theft. If a bike share tire is flat, you return it to a dock and press a button for service.
Every person who rides a bike cuts down on road congestion and shoulder-to-shoulder crowding on trains and buses.
According to Walsh, Ford GoBikes average around 800 trips a day in the East Bay. The total rises to more than 1,000 trips on sunny days.
There are 1,100 to 1,200 bikes in the field, depending on the number of bikes that need to be repaired.
Bike shares won’t have a true equitable impact — and full support from the community — until they’re easily accessible to all people in communities and cities.
“We definitely would love to expand to deep East Oakland, and we are working with Oakland in looking at that,” Walsh said. “We’re not done yet. This is our initial contract. The landscape is changing so fast. We definitely do want to expand into East Oakland.”
Ford GoBike is about to complete the first phase of its expansion in Oakland — a total of 78 stations — with two stations in Jack London Square.
According to the Oakland Department of Transportation, more than 1,300 Oakland residents have signed up for yearly memberships. That number includes about 250 who qualified for the $5 per-year “Bike Share For All,” the lowincome membership program. More than 100,000 bike share trips have been taken.
In February 2016, a city ordinance granted a franchise agreement to Motivate to operate the bike share program. The agreement required that 20 percent of stations be in West Oakland or East Oakland.
East Oakland is defined as areas east of 14th Avenue, where there are only nine bike stations. Sean Maher, spokesman for the Oakland Department of Transportation, told me the department is looking for opportunities to expand the service “either by relocating existing stations or by planning and installing new stations.”
I’m for putting something new in East Oakland.