E-bike program set for expansion
New docks coming to Live Oak, Twin Lakes, Pleasure Point, Capitola
The next phase of an electric bicycle program is preparing for launch in the Santa Cruz Mid County region next month and community members may see supporting infrastructure begin to pop up around town in the coming weeks.
Continuing the momentum from a launch in Santa Cruz last summer, 33 docking stations from Wisconsin-based e-bike rideshare company BCycle will be installed in Live Oak, Twin Lakes, Pleasure Point and Capitola before the end of the month and just in time for additional bicycles to hit the streets in March. Capitola alone will be home to 20 of the docks.
According to a release from the county's Community Development and Infrastructure Department, the launch will bring a fleet of 75 e-bikes to the Mid County region with more than 150 cumulative individual bicycle parking spaces. Each docking station can hold four to six e-bikes.
“I'm excited to finally see this level of range with BCycle's program in our community,” said 1st District Santa Cruz County Supervisor Manu Koenig in the release. “This bike share system will provide a clean, car-free way to get all the way from Westside Santa Cruz to the Harbor, Pleasure Point, and Capitola.”
The E-bike share program was made possible through a multijurisdictional coalition that includes the county, the cities of Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville along with Cabrillo College and UC Santa Cruz.
The first link in the program's bicycle chain was established last June when Santa Cruz and the UC Santa Cruz campus saw more than 400 dock-based ebikes and 86 parking stations come to the region. The Sentinel reported at the time that the countywide number of BCycle ebikes could end up totaling 660 with 1,320 docks.
One of the features of BCycle's system that has been lauded by leaders in Santa Cruz and Capitola is that the bicycles must be parked back into one of the designated docks at the end of a ride in an effort to prevent them from
getting scattered across neighborhoods — the basis for the majority of complaints
in previous iterations.
Santa Cruz embarked on another e-bike rideshare project in 2018 with JUMP bikes, but the program ended only a few years later in 2020 amid
rideshare
the COVID-19 pandemic and complaints about haphazard parking spots and frightening run-ins with pedestrians.
When the BCycle program was approved by Capitola leaders early last year,
it was confirmed that the BCycle program does not require helmets, though city officials said they planned to partner with local bicycle safety organizations that encourage safe riding practices.