More than 70 demonstrators biked from Mission Beach to Pacific Beach Saturday, Jan 30 advocating a change of locations for DecoBike rentals in San Diego. Meanwhile, tourists and residents want to know why bike rental owners are so upset about DecoBike.
“We want to demonstrate the problems that we have with the mismanagement of the city’s bike share program (DecoBike). There’s a lot of people in the city who don’t know why we are upset with the way the entire program is implemented. “I want to tell why this is done wrong and why there’s injustice,” Cheap Rental Bikes owner Matt Gardner said.
Gardner said that when DecoBike came to the city, it declared that it was only going to help commuters, which Gardner said he supports. But the placement of the DecoBike stations are at tourist sites and in front of hotels, such as the Bahia and the Catamaran, wherein bike rental businesses already exist. Owners say DecoBike is competing directly with them.
“They are stepping on my bottom line, and they are partnering with the city to do it,” Gardner said.
Jake Russell, owner of Surf Monkey Bikes, hopes DecoBike is a short-term trend.
“Horse is out of the barn; bikes are already here; the business has to fail. And I think it is failing. As long as they don’t get any government money or any other subsidy from the city, I don’t think it will survive,” he said.
Russell claims that the city of San Diego is interfering with the bike rental shop owners’ business, adding that the Chamber of Commerce hasn’t listened to local business owners.
“The head of the Chamber of Commerce made DecoBike part of their ring of champions before the contract was even dry,” Russell said. “He never checked with anyone if it would hurt local businesses. Help us. Don’t work against us. We are paying you,” he said.
DecoBike office manager Melinda Pederson says that one of the company’s takeaways was that Pacific Beach groups are primarily opposed to the company’s presence on the west side of the boardwalk due to visual impact. DecoBike agreed to move one of the stations to the east side of the boardwalk pending discussion with the fronting property owner. In response to community concerns, it reduced the number of proposed stations, reduced the size of the stations and removed rates that were seen as too low and thus competitive with local bike shops. Pederson says that the company’s presence is the result of a partnership with the City of San Diego. A requirement is that DecoBike privately funds the operation. As a result, DecoBike considers how to make the bike share system financially sustainable.
“When communities only want the low-density, low-visibility locations and oppose high-volume, highly visible locations, we can’t necessarily accommodate those wishes in their entirety,” Pederson said.
In a DecoBike survey conducted in September of 2015, 72 percent of respondents stated that they would not have rented from a bike shop if a bike share concession were unavailable. According to transaction data from DecoBike, 44 percent of boardwalk station activity occurred outside of bike shop hours, after 6 p.m. and before 9 a.m.
Russell said he would like to see everybody taking responsibility for the city’s own bike share program rather than bringing an overseer in from out of state.
The bike rental shop owners by the beach say they are united because they are concerned for their fellow owners. Russell is afraid rental shop owners could go out of business, opening more vacancies in the area.
Fred Day, president of Mission Beach Town Council, has written a letter to Mayor Kevin Faulconer saying that the competition between DecoBike and the rental shops should stop.
“DecoBikes racks,” Day wrote, “are close enough to our community as to once again push city-supported competition upon our local businesses located at Ventura Place, Mission Boulevard and Belmont Park. Indeed, these particular racks are only approximately 100 meters from a local rental facility located on north side of West Mission Bay Drive.”
To see the whole letter, visit sdnews.com.