Have you seen all the bikes all over downtown San Diego?
Longtime San Diego Union Tribune sports columnist Nick Canepa likes to call Kevin Faulconer the “bicycle mayor”, when he takes jabs over the city’s failure to be able to keep the Chargers and think big when it comes to new football stadiums and sports arenas for San Diego.
Well, anyone else who was near Petco Park for the Padres opening weekend of the MLB season, saw why the Mayor and the City Council now have a bicycle problem.
Virtually anywhere you go now in the East Village or almost anywhere you go downtown, as well as in Pacific Beach and a couple of other neighborhoods, bicycles are everywhere, and left anywhere users want to leave them. They sometimes block crosswalks downtown and shop entrances in PB.
The proliferation over a matter of just a few weeks of the dockless bikes brought to town by several different companies has led to San Diego’s bicycle problem that the Mayor and the Council are going to have to deal with.
There are clearly popular. You download an app, and you can grab a bike, ride it for a very cheap price and when you’re done with it, you just leave it somewhere or anywhere.
Business owners are calling for regulations and even some of those in the dockless bicycle business have suggested a need for at least self-regulation.
The yellow, orange and green bikes along with the motorized scooters that also are filling sidewalk space are being called everything from a nuisance for business owners to sight pollution to a safety hazard.
At City Hall, many are hoping the wheels are already turning to find a way to solve San Diego’s bicycle problem.
(Photo credit KOGO News)