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Cycling will be an essential — and fun! — tool for transportation in Santa Barbara, if we let it.
Most definitely it was my wife’s bike I saw out of the corner of my eye early one cool, gray morning. But just as definitely, it was not my wife walking her bike down the sidewalk.
Only a few months prior, I’d given her bike — a vintage Peugeot collecting cobwebs in our shed — a major makeover of the tutti-frutti variety. Yellow brake cables. Orange derailleur cables. And a new big black puffy seat cushy enough to accommodate any and all asses.
With that bike, Jennie could have joined the circus. Hell, she could have been the circus. Sometimes comfort and fun trump ergonomic purity. The point is to have something you actually want to ride.
Jennie never got that pleasure. She died suddenly before taking her revamped machine out for a spin. After her death, I distracted myself in a short-lived frenzy of house cleaning. I wound up donating her bike to BiCi Centro, an old-school bike kitchen where DIY repair skills are taught to the uninitiated by a large team of staff and volunteer mechanics. It’s also where old bikes — up to 30 a week — get dropped off, refurbished, recycled, and resold.
In other words, it’s a way station on the road to reincarnation.
I quickly wheeled back to the guy holding Jennie’s bike. The encounter could have been awkward. Instead, we shook hands, swapped names, and I told him the story of his bike. He was a well-put-together guy in his mid-30s, his head seemingly on his shoulders and his feet firmly on the ground. He, it also turned out, was homeless. As we spoke, I couldn’t help wondering if our encounter was some woo-woo transmission from the great beyond. Was Jennie reaching out? Either way, she would have approved. The bike would finally be getting some use. And more importantly, by someone who really needed it.
I asked the man how Jennie’s bike was working out. “Really good,” he said, but then pointed down to the chain. It had somehow broken; drooping off the sprocket and scraping along the sidewalk. I was reminded of a story I told at her memorial service that illuminated her defining combination of kindness and ferocity. When she was a little girl, a bigger kid made the mistake of trying to bully her. He pushed her; she pushed back. And down he went with his bicycle in a big clattering tumble. Jennie then picked him up, and his bicycle. His chain had fallen off the chainring, so she put it back on for him. Maybe I wanted to take this broken chain as a sign. Maybe I needed to. I don’t know if it qualifies as a genuinely woo-woo moment or merely woo-woo adjacent. But it worked for me. My new friend walked off to BiCi Centro to get his chain fixed.
Reincarnating Bikes
As part of its mission, BiCi Centro — a small but critical part of Move Santa Barbara, a sprawling nonprofit dedicated to expanding mobility options beyond those imposed by the monopolistic hegemony of the automobile — works closely with local shelter and homeless service providers to get such bikes into the hands of their clients. And free of charge. BiCi Centro’s mechanics make sure those bikes are roadworthy and safe, fit the riders, and are equipped with lights, locks, and a helmet.
In 2023, BiCi Centro gave away 90 such bikes to homeless people and sold 78 refurbished bikes to the public.
In 2023, BiCi Centro gave away 90 such bikes to homeless people and sold 78 refurbished bikes to the public. Typically, these are sturdy utilitarian street bikes sold at below-Craigslist prices. But vintage bike collectors can always find a few retro chic gems lurking amid BiCi Centro’s sales racks.
In addition, BiCi Centro repairs about 30 bikes a week. About half of these are straight-up cash-for-service repair jobs like at any other bike shop, though roughly half as expensive. The other half are do-it-yourself repairs by owners with guidance and direction from BiCi’s squadron of mechanics. That runs $10 an hour. But if you have a student ID from City College — where BiCi Centro operates a satellite shop — it’s free. The animating principle here is accessibility and affordability.
MOVE Santa Barbara County advocates for equitable countywide infrastructure for walking, cycling, and public transit, and empowers and educates residents to choose active and sustainable forms of transportation. They also operate two BiCi Centro community bike shops that provide low-cost refurbished bicycles and parts, bike maintenance, and opportunities to learn maintenance skills through a DIY program.
Commuting for Joy and Profit
For most of my adult life, I’ve had the great good fortune of riding my bike to work. I didn’t do it because it was good for me or the planet. That it happens to be both, I chalk up as a happy coincidence.
I started riding when I was a kid, and somehow I never stopped. That detail — not stopping — I think is key. When my friends got their driver’s licenses, they had a tendency to become zombies. Some would drive to visit their next-door neighbor. I was appalled. I looked at cars and driving as yet another friction point over which my parents could exert control. In that formula, bikes equated to independence. They meant freedom. They meant fun.
Many eons later, they still do, though admittedly for different reasons.
Over the years, I worked as a bicycle messenger in Washington, D.C., still one of the best jobs I ever had. Twice I made multistate bike treks riding from Wisconsin to D.C., meeting people I would never have met if traveling by car. On a bike, you are semipermeable; you see and experience people and things you simply could not otherwise see. Accidental encounters, over time, engender accidental community. Before long, you’re less alone on the planet.
Yes, there are falls. But you learn to get up. That’s not a bad habit. No matter how tired you are, you discover, you can always shift into that phantom gear and grind your way up the hill.
On a bike, you are forced to pay closer attention as a matter of survival. In so doing, you also notice the mundane miracles always hiding in plain sight. That’s a gift you can’t buy on any car lot.
In recent years, the word “joy” pops up with increasing frequency in our broader national debate. As a bike rider — and more precisely as a bike commuter — “joy” is not a foreign language. I enjoy joyful pinch-me moments on my bike on a regular basis. On a bike, you are forced to pay closer attention as a matter of survival. In so doing, you also notice the mundane miracles always hiding in plain sight. That’s a gift you can’t buy on any car lot. More than a few times, my children would express embarrassed incredulity at the stupid grin on my face as I rode up our street. We should all be so lucky, I would reply, to be so stupid.
Bikes are cheaper than cars. There are no monthly payments. No extortion at the gas pump, no repair bills, no insurance, no smog testing, no registration. You can always find free parking. You never have to wait through five or six rotations to get through a red light during rush hour. When my diet skewed heavily toward beer, ice cream, and donuts, my daily commute kept the poundage down. No gym membership required.
The 4,000-Pound Gorilla on the Roads
There is, of course, a countervailing reality that must be acknowledged. Many people are too afraid to ride. And for obvious and legitimate reasons. To ride on a busy road with cars requires a degree of faith in passing motorists — and their fractured attention spans — that hovers between religious zealotry and delusional denialism. (For all the times I was nearly killed by some spaced-out idiot behind the wheel, my life has been spared by just as many alert drivers who were paying more attention in the moment than I was. To all of you, many thanks.)
F. Scott Fitzgerald reportedly said the ability to hold contradictory thoughts at the same time suggests the presence of a first-rate mind. There’s little evidence Fitzgerald was ever sober long enough to ride a bicycle, but the contradictory realities confronting anyone trying to do so right now in Santa Barbara requires the sort of intelligence he reportedly described.
The big picture for the City of Santa Barbara — the birthplace of the modern environmental movement — seems to be violently at cross purposes with itself. In the past seven years, City Hall has invested more than $125 million (state and local dollars) in bike paths and other infrastructure designed to keep cyclists and pedestrians safe and make driving a car a matter of choice rather than of necessity. This level of commitment and determination — accompanied by the City Council’s passage of a new bicycle master plan and its embrace of Vision Zero as a traffic violence safety goal concerning pedestrians and cyclists — is the greatest since the 1970s when the burgeoning “ecology” movement gave rise to Santa Barbara’s first tsunami of bike path development. But at the same time, the percentage of workers who ride to their jobs has plummeted by half, from 6% in 2014 to less than 3% last year. More ominously, the number of bicycle-involved accidents has spiked dramatically.
Traffic planners and bike activists take pains to point out that the streets of 2024 are very different places than 10 years ago. Drivers are far more distracted. Hands free or not, cellphone calls require a cognitive load. Trisalyn Nelson, chair of UCSB’s Geography Department and a passionate bicycle advocate, said the public safety threat of distracted driving needs to be treated the same as drunk driving. But that goal, she acknowledged, remains a long way away. Cars have also gotten bigger and higher, sightlines have changed and visibility lowered. When these elevated vehicles strike pedestrians, they tend to hit internal organs now as opposed to knees and hips, driving death rates upward. During COVID, driving habits changed, and not for the better. They have yet to change back. It’s not a pretty picture.
At least this is the story told by what passes for official statistics. While this narrative rings impressionistically true, it remains uncertain how precise it actually is. And, as Trisalyn argues, when it comes to the allocation of scarce public resources for limited space on our roads, such details matter. The best data we have on the number of bike commuters comes from a company called Replica, which sells that information to the Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG). According to Replica, 3.73% of all South Coast (not City of Santa Barbara) workers commuted to their jobs by bike in 2023; that’s down from 5.5% in 2019.
But SBCAG officials concede these numbers are squishy; Replica does a much better job tracking cars than bikes. Trisalyn puts it more bluntly, calling Replica’s bike-related data “garbage.” She has cross-checked Replica’s results at 15 intersections by looking at the actual video provided by City Hall, and her findings differed from Replica’s “by an order of magnitude.” And Replica doesn’t distinguish between recreational riders and bike commuters at all.
For Trisalyn, the lack of reliable data makes it impossible to determine if bike infrastructure is working and provides no way to prioritize limited public resources. She cautions against “leaning in too much to the current narrative,” and is currently working to secure funding to create a user-friendly data dashboard.
Trisalyn is also beating the drum to better track bike-related accidents and near misses, data necessary to determine the most urgent needs when evaluating public resource expenditures. She wants to create crowd-sourced apps that will enable cyclists to chart desired routes and report crashes. At a recent public forum on bikes, safety, and public policy, she reported there are roughly 190 bike accidents — and two fatalities – a year in Santa Barbara County. But at the same forum, she said, official numbers only tell 20% of the story.
Wheels of Perception
Perhaps the best — though most perverse – barometer of bicycling’s growing importance in Santa Barbara is the extent to which it’s become a reliable focus of public irritation. Initially, the collective gripe was about packs of lycra-clad recreational cyclists — typically affluent gray-haired males – riding $6,000 designer steeds in happy oblivion to the cars backing up behind them. Then, as COVID dawned, packs of wheelie-popping, stunt-riding Latino teenagers occupied the vacant public streetscape of Santa Barbara’s new pedestrian mall. If they made passersby a little nervous, so much the better. They have since been supplanted by hordes of young teens — typically Anglo — throttling their e-bike variants down State Street at speeds (up to 28 miles per hour) seemingly designed to alarm and infuriate. Which they do.
As Santa Barbara struggles to reimagine, re-engineer, and remake its quasi-collapsed central business district, there’s been much loud muttering about banning bicycles entirely from State Street. But State Street is called out in the city’s Bike Master Plan as the spine for the city’s bicycle network. This reflects the level of friction over bicycles in even the most genteel and environmentally minded communities.
The reality is e-bikes aren’t going anywhere. If anything, they’re just getting started. According to UCSB’s Trisalyn, half the bikes on Santa Barbara city streets are electric. The mother of a 15-year-old, she knows firsthand the countervailing emotions churned up by the advent of e-bikes. She worries every day that her son rides to high school. Yet every time he rides, he keeps her and her car off the road for one full hour.
And as Jessica Grant, the city’s transportation planning czar put it, e-bikes have the capacity to “erase hills and distance.” City Hall has been slow to respond to the risks — perceived and real — posed by speed-intoxicated adolescents. The police department lacks the staffing (and seemingly the inclination) to bite off what could easily devolve into a lose-lose law enforcement proposition.
Public, Speed-Safe E-Bikes
Hiding quietly in plain sight is the apparent success enjoyed by the city’s e-bike share program known as BCycle. The program started in January 2021 with 75 bikes good for trips up to 30 miles. By the end of 2023, that number had mushroomed to 246 e-bikes, 86 stations, and 496 dock spaces. The city has funds for 50 more bikes and 100 more docks, and for more aggressive outreach to low-income riders, who now make up less than 2% of BCycle’s riders.
BCycle e-bikes don’t seem to count when reckless e-bikers are mentioned, maybe because they top out at 17 miles an hour. The bad news is that BCycle has yet to break even financially in Santa Barbara. For now, it helps that BCycle is owned by Trek, and that Trek’s president and owner, John Burke, lives in Santa Barbara at least part-time.
John is not just a business person who got rich selling bicycles. He’s a true believer in the cause. At a recent cycling forum, he wondered how it is that a city like Santa Barbara — with its inviting climate year-round — could post such paltry bicycle commuting percentages when a city like Copenhagen, with more than its fair share of wet and cold weather, is leading the world. Like me, John believes there are few problems in the world that couldn’t be solved if only more people rode bicycles. In his case, he’s done the research to back it up: Health care costs, obesity, and diabetes are just the start. For the time being, John is content to put his money where his mouth is where BCycle is concerned.
BCycle is an app-enabled e-bike share service. Single rides are $8 plus tax every 30 minutes. Monthly passes are $30 plus tax, and include unlimited trips under 30 minutes, with a $3 charge for each additional 30 minutes. Annual passes are $225 plus tax, and include unlimited trips under 60 minutes, with $3 for each additional 30 minutes.
Coming Together on Two Wheels
So how do we get more people to discover the joys of cycling? If you ask UCSB’s Trisalyn, she’ll tell you: a bike-lane system so sprawling and connected that it creates a seamless pathway allowing people to ride from Point A to Point Z and all letters in between. That is what’s known as the “connectivity” premise. Heather Deutch, director of Move SB, heartily endorses the connectivity theory, but also believes people need to take more individual responsibility.
At a recent forum — also attended by John and Trisalyn — Heather called on people to be more conscious about what trips can be taken without getting into a car. Not speaking at that forum was Dr. Daniel Fishbein, a retired epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and perhaps the most contrarian of all bicycle advocates in Santa Barbara. He doesn’t think spending money or building bike paths has made any difference. People are too addicted to their cars, plain and simple, he says. An avid cyclist, he stated, “To my fellow bicyclists: Stop complaining and do something else to help. … The bicycling in Santa Barbara may not be the best in the West, but it’s pretty good.”
The data suggests that it could be much better. Of workers on the South Coast, 33.5% travel 2 miles or less to go to their jobs. Another 32% live between 2 and 6 miles from where they work. But data suggest only about 3% of Santa Barbarans commute by bike, which is actually down from 6% in 2014. Even allowing for all the working parents whose carpooling obligations are bicycle-prohibitive, that’s a big opportunity gap. Given the recent passage of new state laws that abolish developers’ obligation to provide parking spaces for new housing units, one would think the demand for some form of bipedal transport will grow.
Some have suggested the mere presence of more cyclists on the road will encourage others to join them. That’s the “safety in numbers” theory. And despite some recent blowback against e-bikes, surveys suggest that people are up to four times as likely to get on an e-bike than ride a manual or “acoustic” bike. I’d suggest that’s the missing link.
Either way, I’m riding. With or without bike lanes. With or without an electric motor. It’s just too much fun. It’s good for the heart. It’s good for the soul. And it also just happens to be good for the planet.
Get Pedaling
Bike Shops in Santa Barbara
- Bici Centro Community Bike Shops, 434 Olive St., Santa Barbara, and Santa Barbara City College, 721 Cliff Dr.
- Fastrack Bicycles, 118 W. Canon Perdido St., Santa Barbara
- Hazard’s Cyclesport, 110 Anacapa St., Santa Barbara
- Isla Vista Bicycle Boutique, 880 Embarcadero Del Mar, Isla Vista
- Open Air Bicycles, 135 E. Carrillo St., Santa Barbara
- Velo Pro Cyclery, 15 Hitchcock Way, Santa Barbara, and 5887 Hollister Ave., Goleta
Group Rides in Santa Barbara
Get Out of Your Car
The Santa Barbara County Association of Governments (SBCAG) Traffic Solutions team can help you find alternatives to driving alone, from electric buses to carpools, vanpools, and e-bike lending programs. They also offer an app, SmartRide, for trip planning.
