CityofSantaBarbara
By the City of Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara Public Library is thrilled to partner with Santa Barbara BCycle to expand access to their e-bike share program to the Santa Barbara community. With the addition of BCycle to the SBPL’s Library of Things collection, BCycle and presenting sponsor Bosch are hoping to expose more residents to the benefits of the electric bikes available in the community. Electric bikes are a convenient, safe, and sustainable form transportation.
Beginning May 26, library cardholders can check out a BCycle pass from the Central Library. The available BCycle passes can be borrowed for one week, and patrons can have unlimited one-hour rides for the duration of the checkout period. Additional passes will be available from Eastside Library and the Library on the Go van later this summer.
The BCycle Library Pass Program is made possible with support from Bosch. Bosch e-bike systems power Santa Barbara BCycle’s growing fleet of 250 pedal-assist electric bikes, and now, are powering bike share access for more riders in the Santa Barbara community.
Santa Barbara Public Library and BCycle will host a kick-off event for the program for residents to learn more and ride e-bikes for free on Thursday, May 25, at East Beach next to Reunion Kitchen from 5:30 p.m. to 7 p.m. Stop by the Library on the Go to get a Library card, check out books, and take an BCycle e-bike for a test ride! Representatives from BCycle, Santa Barbara Public Library, and Bosch will be available to talk with residents and media about the impact they hope the bike share’s new access initiative will bring to the community.
Visit the Santa Barbara Public Library online at SBPLibrary.org for information about programs and services. All library programs are free and open to the public.
This is the library that wants more funding and says it cannot live within the budget. What a strange thing it is to see library funds being used to subsidize bicycle companies! This is why so many SB Library people have chosen to use Goleta. This is why we should keep our politicians from handing out more to an already amazingly overfunded library. How many millions of $ has this library drained from our community in the past few years? Why has this library alienate itself from the Black Gold system that wanted their participation? Why is this library administration trying to “reinvent” library culture when that has served us so well for more than a century? This leadership needs to change.
A lot of library spending recently has been channeled into long overdue, much needed building repairs and updates. I have known library employees who refused to ride in the cranky old elevator! And the Bcycle deal cost to the library is probably negligible. Still, it seems mystifying to traditional patrons that the library is now loaning bikes, guitars, binoculars and passes to state parks. Guess it all has to do with the vision of a 21st Century library that has not been adequately defined for the general public.
Guess it is that the “vision” has not been adequately defined?! What arrogance. This idea that the “public” is to obtuse to understand what the leaders are up to is so smug. Maybe the leaders are not listening to the people paying their salary to do a job that they want done as it has been done for decades. I the vision is not convincing it is probably not a plan at all.
It doesn’t sound as though this will cost the library anything, since it’s sponsored by Bosch, but sponsoring e-bikes does not seem within a Public LIbrary’s mission. …Our library has gone down so much since Cadiente came from Lompoc. She left a trail of dissatisfied library users there and has been busily engaged in making the SB library, once part of the Black and Gold system, now only Montecito (self-funded, mostly) and Santa Barbara – the Eastside is part of SB! I, too, have moved on to Goleta and become a “friend” of that library.
🙂 Not my arrogance… I don’t understand the new library culture either.
I am not saying he public is too dumb to understand. Rather, no effective effort has been made to explain why the library is loaning out 3-D digial printers from a Library of Things.
That is nice but not related to the common definition of a library: “building or room containing collections of books, periodicals, and sometimes films and recorded music for people to read, borrow, or refer to”.
But the city (and much of the world) seems all-in-one on a digital future that will eventually replace all physical reading material. That is an Orwellian prospect, of course. Local example came about a decade ago when the SBNP revised their already pathetically incomplete digital archives to delete the bylines on articles and replace journalists names with Staff Writer.