Bike Program Hits a Bump in the Road

Where oh where have the ugly yellow bicycles gone?

No one in Hermosa Beach is sure.

Six weeks ago, a few citizens in the laid-back seaside town embarked upon a social experiment in trust and confidence. They placed 35 clunky old bicycles in convenient downtown locations for anyone with a hankering to ride one around the area.

Dubbed the Yellow Bike Program, it was the first time a Southern California city had followed in the footsteps of a handful of other U.S. cities trying to cut pollution, reduce traffic and boost pedal power.

The idea was that anyone could pick up a bike in this town of 18,300 people, ride it for a while and return the brightly painted vehicle to a designated location or convenient spot to be used by the next person in need of wheels.

But out of 35 bicycles, there are few to be found.

At Java Centrale, a recently opened coffee house that is the only officially designated Yellow Bike drop-off location, there is not a single bicycle.

“It’s empty,” said coffee house owner Jawad Ursani of the bike rack outside. “A customer and I were just talking about those bikes. No one has seen them.”

Michael Lupo, a multimedia artist and self-described bicycle maniac who had his 1959 AMF Road Master parked outside Java Centrale, used a bicycle a few weeks ago at about 1:30 a.m. He and a couple of friends were downtown and planned to return to his apartment. But they were in need of refreshments.

Lupo saw a yellow bike, picked it up, rode to a local liquor store, rode back and left the two-wheeled vehicle in the downtown area.

“It was a wonderful convenience for that moment,” he said, sipping on a thick brew of coffee.

One yellow bike sits like a solitary sentinel in the front window of Felder’s Body Shop. Owner Mike Felder is part of the bicycle project. The bike is a sort of an advertisement for the program, which has been embraced by environmentalists and avid cyclists engaged in an exercise in sharing among the masses.

So far, the exercise isn’t working, but that is not deterring the organizers. They’re convinced that if they put enough bikes out there, the vehicles just might stay.

“This is the risk you run when you do something like this,” said Stephen Sammarco, who started the Yellow Bike Program on Aug. 16 to coincide with the opening of a new plaza next to the pier. “I still have complete faith in our community that they will embrace it.”

Next month, he plans to put another 30 bicycles on the streets. And the Rotary Club wants him to expand the program throughout the Los Angeles area next year.

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Sammarco’s bike plan is similar to other programs launched across the country and modeled after one started more than 40 years ago in Amsterdam. Portland, Ore., began its program three years ago and it spread to places such as Boulder, Colo., Austin, Texas, Missoula, Mont., and Fresno, Calif. San Francisco is putting together a bicycle project that will be supported by various government funding.

Although Sammarco, a 30-year-old financial consultant, is ever the optimist, there are others who are more cautious. Felder, who has seen more yellow than he cares to remember after painting most of the bikes, stands in his car repair shop and shakes his head, wondering if the bike program will ever take off.

“I think it is going to take a while. We need more sites [for the bikes] and more organization,” Felder said. “But if you don’t believe in a system like this, why be here?”

Sammarco, a Rotary Club member, thought this would be the perfect project for the local chapter to undertake. He saw a public television program on other Yellow Bike projects and wanted to see one in Hermosa Beach. Corporate donations and club money covered the first year’s $750 cost for liability insurance, paint and parts. Volunteers from the Rotary Club, such as Felder and bicycle shop owner Mohammad Seraj , and the community have provided the know-how and muscle.

The first thing Sammarco did was contact Jim Burgess, a Rotary Club member in Fresno who started a similar program there in early 1996.

In 18 months, Burgess has placed 450 yellow bikes at strategic spots around town: bus stops, major intersections, the convention center and the local campus of Cal State. Inmates at the Pleasant Valley State Prison in Coalinga refurbish and paint the Fresno bikes.

But how many of those 450 bicycles are still on the streets is a major question. “I don’t have time to figure that out,” Burgess said. “I put them out there and trust the people will put them to good use. If they abscond with them, that means somebody must be using them.”

A like-minded attitude existed in Portland, where nearly 1,000 yellow bikes were released throughout the city over a three-year period through the Yellow Bike Project started by Tom O’Keefe.

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Recently, however, the bike office closed. O’Keefe left town for some undisclosed Arizona destination. And yellow bikes are as rare as sunshine on a wintry Oregon day.

“Most of them have disappeared,” said Ira Grishaver, program director for the Community Cycling Center, a nonprofit group in Portland that took over the bicycle project about one month ago.

Grishaver and others are mulling over ways to improve the bicycle program, which will be relaunched with a fleet of 200 bicycles in May.

The new bikes will be stripped of their middle bar, making them look like women’s bicycles and less attractive to steal. The seat will be welded on and large plastic baskets will be attached to the bike, making them functional but ugly to thieves.

In Boulder, Colo., a free community bike program called Spokes for Folks has been relatively successful during its three-year run in the university town of 95,600.

Sponsored with $20,000 a year from parking meter funds, the city puts out bikes every June and has high school students start to collect them around Halloween. Otherwise, the bikes end up in snow drifts.

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Last year, Spokes for Folks distributed 120 bright green bicycles given names such as Winnie the Pooh, Brave Heart and Fantastic Voyage. They retrieved 90 in the fall. This year they have 137 bicycles on the streets.

“We are a biking community so that’s why I think we are supported,” said Jan Ward, Boulder’s downtown employee transportation coordinator.

Each community has had its successes and failures. It’s just a matter of figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

“I think it is a viable concept, but it needs tweaking,” said Grishaver of Portland. “And each community has its own requirement.”

Hermosa Beach will have to figure out its own particular requirements.