Electric Bike Share Coming to Downtown Santa Barbara

This is not a new idea. Do a web search for “bike sharing in China.” The entire industry went broke. Now there are tens of millions of abandoned bicycles there, literally mountains of discarded bicycles.

These bikes will all end up in Mexico before a year is out.

Agree this is likely to create more problems than solutions. Need to make the major one-way streets off limits to cyclists. Especially De La Vina: too many bicyclists on that street (competing for Darwin Awards, apparently, but someone else will pay dearly for their stupidity, laziness, and selfishness).

How do helmets fit into this mess?
The new downtown promenade should allow walking bikes only!

Bikes in Santa Barbara are becoming a problem. We need more bike lanes. I live in De La Vina I am guessing 3 to 4 times a day I see a nuke causing traffic issues if not accidents. Stay off our streets that do not have bike paths. Plain and simple. These new bikes will be stolen. Theirs can figure out how to do it,

electric bikes are for wimps. overweight people with zero coordination are suddenly zooming around on sidewalks

Tear down all the street trees because that is the only way to widen sidewalks to allow for true bike paths. Being green demands sacrifice - street trees or safe bikes paths right now. Trees will regrow someplace else - space for dedicated bike paths will not. Down with the trees, up with the city wide bike paths. Just like Europe.

Terrible decision. Agree that it will negatively affect existing local businesses that already offer these services. And especially if dockless they will be strewn everywhere like the scooters.

The story doesn't say but this probably involves some revenue for the City. No way are they going to turn down revenue at this point.

I've lived in cities where these are common both in the US and Europe where they make sense. I'm young, I love to ride bikes, and I would love to feel safe doing so here (like I have while living in Germany). I just don't really see this as anything but a waste of funds, energy, and resources for SB. We don't really want drunk tourists pedaling around confused. And by the way, how does this help local business? We have tons of local businesses offering bike rentals already. Why do we need this? Does anyone know how it actually even works? Trucks have to drive around at night to collect bikes and redistribute them often because docking stations don't magically fill up proportionally so bikes get left all over. An even worse disaster as the dockless bikes - saw those fail spectacularly in London. Another diversion by local officials from real issues. This will fail and 2 years from launch they will admit such and then we'll see how much tax money we wasted on it. We may not be able to accurately account for the damage done to local businesses who do rent bikes. Just dumb.

Agree. Will just be a mess. Sorry.

We need a better network of bike paths (similar to European cities) before we unleash this on the city.
While I like the idea, it just feels like this city is not properly setup for this. It would be great if we had at least one class IV bike path running down State and connecting to the waterfront. What's going to happen when tourists rent these and inevitably try to make their way to the waterfront? They're going to end up on sidewalks, wrong way streets, etc.