Two things I never thought would happen in my lifetime:
Efficient rail transportation in Los Angeles
Well, this hasn’t actually appeared yet but this recently showed up at an intersection near my house:
So I am hopeful that, come May 20th, I’ll actually be able to go somewhere cool on public transportation (downtown LA / the beach).
Biking as a popular form of transportation
When I first started biking to work in 2008, it was pretty popular at Google but pretty niche elsewhere:
- I lost my badge while biking home from work and a coworker was the next one to come by and pick it up. Great for me, maybe not so great for the popularity of biking.
- When I got a citation for rolling a stop sign (sigh…) the officer didn’t actually know enough of the laws to give me a proper lecture and I ended up educating him on biking-on-the-sidewalk laws in LA county.
Santa Monica, bless its heart, has invested a ton in recent times into popularizing biking, from maintaining the hugely popular beach bike lane, to expanded bike lanes throughout the city, to repainting the bike lanes green to visually separate them from other lanes. Recently though, they’ve taken a big step beyond this and joined the likes of Paris, New York City, and Chicago in rolling out a substantial bike sharing system, called Breeze bike share. They’ve got these cute little green bikes:
The basic idea is simple and very similar to the systems in those large cities. Pay $6 hourly or $99 annually (1 hour of riding per day) to be able to ride these anywhere within the Santa Monica zone, which extends pretty far beyond Santa Monica proper - north to San Vicente Ave, south to Venice Blvd, west to the ocean, east to the 405 freeway.
You can use the mobile app to locate stations and bikes and unlock bikes either with an ID code or a NFC card. LA’s TAP card works for this so I have one card that works for all public transportation: bike share, Big Blue Bus / LA Metro Bus, and the forthcoming Expo train line :).
The bikes themselves are heavy but relatively fast for their size. They’ve got:
- 8 gears with an internal hub / chain
- Integrated front and rear lights turn on at night, although I’m not sure how they’re powered
- Decent sized basket in the front for your groceries / items
- Bell and kickstand
When returning or checking out a bike, you can report a problem to have one of their maintenance guys come look at later.
Crucially different from the other systems I’ve tried though is that all the smarts of the bike system are tied to the bikes and not the bike stations. I’m talking about the cute little solar panel and computer on the back of the bike there. This distinction makes a huge difference in the usability of the system:
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It is super cheap and fast to set up new bike stations as there are no electrical / networking requirements: just space and installation of the rack. Two examples of this:
- There are approximately as many bike stations now as there are bus stops.
- It only took a week for new stations to get set up in Venice near the Google office.
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As long as you lock up your bike near a station, you pay nothing. This is great if you get to a station that happens to be full and can find somewhere to lock it up nearby.
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If you lock up your bike outside of a station but within the Santa Monica zone, you pay a $2 fee. This is great as it gives you a lot of freedom to go wherever there happens to be bike parking (e.g. restaurants, offices, grocery store, et cetera).
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If you take a bike you find outside of a station (e.g. seen on the mobile app) back to a station, you get a $1 credit. I’ve earned $13 this way so far :).
To be fair, some of this was earned in December before they started charging the $2 fee for locking up your bike outside a station. At the time you could cheat the system by riding your bike down the street, locking it up randomly on the sidewalk (not getting charged for this), unlocking it and riding to a station, earning $1 in the process (returning bike outside of station to a station).
The closest comparison I can make is that the program works like Uber for bike sharing. None of the individual improvements over other bike rental companies / taxis are supremely noteworthy, but as a whole it’s a lot more convenient and nicer. The company that runs Santa Monica’s bike sharing program, Social Bicycles, is expanding to a lot of places in the LA area, including Long Beach and Beverly Hills. Stupidly, LA Metro has decided to standardize on a different supplier, which will undoubtedly lead to incompatibility and headaches for years to come. Their supplier doesn’t even put the smarts into the bike!
Although I’ve racked up only about 80 miles on these bikes compared to the 8000+ miles on my beautiful personal Cafe Noir
being a member of the bike sharing program has opened up a lot of options for me:
- Rent two bikes with Callie, ride somewhere, and {take Uber, take a bus, walk} home rather than having to bike both ways. The total cost of doing this today to Santa Monica downtown was $1.70 for the second bike and $2.11 home via Uber (I had a $5 off one ride credit) for a total of $3.81, which is less than the cost of parking my car downtown.
- If I leave my bike at work at night because someone gives me a ride home after say, Friday dinner, I can still ride to work the next day on a shared bike rather than have to get a car ride or take the bus.
- If I want to go on a bike ride for fun and happen to notice one of the bikes out of their station near me, I can take the rental bike and earn $1 for doing a fun bike ride :).
It also gives Callie the opportunity to use one of these for errands or getting around town.
If I ever leave Santa Monica, I’m going to be really sad that I’m giving up all these great public transportation options :(. If you live in Santa Monica or visit often, I highly recommend checking out Breeze bike share - you’ll have a great time rolling through a beach town that’s more beautiful and convenient by bike than any other means of transportation.