By Josh Cohen.
Davis, California, has long held a special place among U.S. bicycle cities. In 1967, it was the first to paint official bike lanes. It has since built bike infrastructure on 76 percent of its streets, which has helped boost the city’s bike commuter mode share to a nation-leading 20 percent. Despite that, Davis — along with neighboring Sacramento, itself ranked in the top 15 large cities for bicycling mode share — has been slow to adopt bike-share, even though cities and bike advocates have rallied around bike-share as a must-have addition to bike networks.
That will soon change, however. After six years of discussions and planning, Davis, Sacramento and the city of West Sacramento are finally getting a bike-share system in May 2018. They are making up for lost time by jumping straight to the next iteration of shared bicycles: electric bikes. The Sacramento Area Council of Governments (SACOG), and cities of Davis, Sacramento and West Sacramento have been working with private bike-share company Social Bicycles (SoBi) to plan the system. SoBi will finance, own and operate the system when it launches.
SoBi has been operating a preview system with 50 non-electric bikes in Sacramento and West Sacramento since May. The full system is slated to kick off on May 15, 2018, with 300 bikes. SoBi will introduce another 600 bikes in the summer. All 900 will be electric, pedal-assist bikes, making it the largest e-bike bike-share scheme in the country. (A group of cities and towns in the Boston region has started discussing a similar system.) Pedal-assist bikes provide users a power boost when they pedal, meaning they can cover more distance with less exertion. The system will be based around bike-share stations that will likely serve as charging stations, but each bike has a built-in lock and can be parked anywhere within the system area.
One of the big questions often raised with electric bike-share is how to ensure the bikes are charged. According to a SACOG spokesperson, planners are still in the process of figuring out the answer. Two ideas on the table are building charging stations, and offering incentives to users to return bikes to the docks for charging. SoBi introduced e-bikes in Washington, D.C., and San Francisco earlier this year. In D.C., users get a $1 credit for returning a bike to a station.
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