Santa Cruz’s newest electric bicycle rideshare program, BCycle, has been plagued in recent weeks by spats of theft and vandalism that have caused dozens of docking stations to be taken offline and wrapped in fluorescent yellow “caution” tape.
Santa Cruz Transportation Planner Claire Gallogly told the Sentinel Tuesday that the city has experienced a significant uptick of the nefarious behavior within the past six to eight weeks, but couldn’t say exactly how many bicycles and docks had been impacted during that period. She added that while the issues have been disruptive in Santa Cruz, neighboring Mid-County regions that also host the program have experienced relatively little impact.
“It is a great program and for those who are using it to get around, it is super critical that it works well,” said Gallogly. “Unfortunately right now we have a really small subset of folks who are really jeopardizing that for them. It’s a problem we’re committed to remedying, but it’s sad and we’re looking forward to fixing it and bringing it back to everything it should be.”
Gallogly explained that the docks get broken in the process of extracting the roughly 65-pound e-bikes, which are later discovered around town with significant front-end damage. BCycle is in the process of redesigning the docks with hardened features, according to Gallogly, and will replace all of the stations in Santa Cruz once the new design is ready for use.
“We had kind of an all-hands-on-deck meeting last week that involved the police chief and lieutenant of operations really collaborating together with BCycle in that as well,” Gallogly said.
Santa Cruz became the first local jurisdiction to launch the BCycle program when it unveiled 400 e-bikes and 800 accompanying docks across the city and at UC Santa Cruz in June 2023. However, the rollout was far from finished, as local transportation planners envisioned a regional system to include about 660 of the battery-powered bikes and over 1,300 docks across all of the county’s jurisdictions, excluding the city of Scotts Valley.
Recent problems notwithstanding, Gallogly said more than 420,000 trips have been logged since the program’s inception. Each bicycle in the fleet gets used on average of 2 1/2 times per day, with a trip distance of 2.6 miles and BCycle covers all capital and operational costs, she said.
“There is a tremendous appetite for on-demand bikeshare that’s available, accessible and easy for people to use,” said Gallogly. “Holding aside the current issues we’re having with theft and vandalism, what we’re seeing is huge levels of adoption with bikeshare.”
Unlike its ill-fated predecessor Jump, BCycle is a dock-based system, meaning users must return the bicycles to a permanent docking station at the end of each ride. That continues to be an appealing feature for local planners that regularly fielded complaints of discarded Jump bicycles left on sidewalks, parks and beaches while the program was active from 2018 to 2020.
But as incidents of theft have worsened, the discarded white and black e-bikes have turned up in unwanted areas across town. A reader in one local Facebook group shared a photo of a BCycle e-bike lying unattended in what appeared to be a tidal area near Pleasure Point, which is within the county’s jurisdiction.
The Santa Cruz troubles also arrive as BCycle is undergoing a broader period of transition. BCycle’s parent company, Trek, was acquired in September by Bicycle Transit Systems, a nationwide bike share organization operating systems in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Philadelphia and beyond. According to the transportation-focused publication Mass Transit, the acquisition was expected to be finalized sometime this month.
Representatives from BCycle’s Santa Cruz branch and Bicycle Transit Systems did not provide comment on this story before the Sentinel’s print deadline Tuesday.
Meanwhile, Santa Cruz Police Chief Bernie Escalante said that law enforcement officials were still gathering information from BCycle management, but confirmed that no arrests associated with theft had been made. He couldn’t say who might be responsible or where the issue was most acute.
“We’re trying to tackle it on different fronts,” said Escalante. “Enforcement is one piece of it, environment design is another piece and improvements on the infrastructure is another piece.”
An additional 50 e-bikes and 100 docks were installed in Capitola, Pleasure Point, Live Oak and Twin Lakes in April, with county leaders touting plans at the time to continue south with more BCycle infrastructure at Soquel Village, Cabrillo College and the greater Aptos area by late summer. A county spokesperson told the Sentinel Tuesday that planners are aware of the recent vandalism incidents and that an expansion to Soquel and Aptos is on hold due to contract updates with BCycle. The spokesperson noted that BCycle is in a transitionary period as new management takes over.
But despite these recent growing pains, Gallogly and other local transportation leaders remain confident the bikeshare model can work, even if it might need a little more grease to the wheels. Matt Miller, a program manager with Ecology Action, which has been instrumental in supporting a successful BCycle rollout as a community partner, said that while there are undeniably some challenges, a program like BCycle is proven to hold too much value to be abandoned now.
“It feels like it’s a little bit of a negative feedback loop at the moment,” said Miller, “but I think anybody who is invested in providing affordable and sustainable transportation options in this county really should be trying to figure out how to make this work.”
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