San Carlos Bikes

The San Carlos Bikes Website as of early 2019

In September of 2018, about a year after I moved to California, I participated in a group ride to inaugurate the Peninsula Bikeway. I found out about this ride from an announcement on Facebook from an organization called San Carlos Bikes. I assumed San Carlos Bikes was a bike club and was very eager to get in touch with them to see if they might be a group with whom I'd want to ride. I had hoped to see them at the Peninsula Bikeway ride, but that did not happen. After the ride I continued to try to get in touch with them but it was not until the following January that I succeeded. I quickly found out that they were not a bike club and, although they sponsored the occasional ride, that was not their main focus. Rather, they were (and are) an advocacy group focused on helping the City of San Carlos become a more bike-friendly community. While living in Houston, Texas, I had been a member of the cycling advocacy group Bike Houston, so although an advocacy group is not what I had originally been looking for, it was of interest nonetheless. My timing was good in that the City of San Carlos had just begun updating their bicycling master plan and was soliciting input so I could both participate in development of that plan and see San Carlos Bikes in action.

Working with San Carlos Bikes was one surprise after another. My first reaction to watching San Carlos Bikes in the context of the hearings that the city held about their bike plan was that it was not a significant player in this process. I was wrong about that because I had not yet learned how San Carlos Bikes works. A second surprise was that San Carlos Bikes held no meetings. That was one reason it took me so long to get in touch with them. I had started with the idea that I would drop in on a meeting, get a sense of what they were about, and based on that decide if I was interested in joining. I couldn't find their meetings because there weren't any, at least at the time. Getting in contact with San Carlos Bikes meant directly contacting its founder, Sonia. Although there were about a dozen members listed on their website, my first impression was that only one of these members, Sonia, made all the decisions. It turned out I completely misunderstood the reality of the situation. Rather than a dictatorship, San Carlos Bikes is more of an anarchy. Its members are all free to do whatever they think best and the way they work together is that when someone has an idea for a project, they personally contact some of the others and ask for help. Some of its members are members of the city council so that rather than being an outside force applying pressure to the city government, San Carlos Bikes is part of an organic whole, a whole that includes the city government. That is not to suggest everyone always agrees, oh my no! Rather, it's that the resolution of any disagreements is more like what happens inside a family than a political process. 

For our first meeting, Sonia invited me to help her with a survey of Burton Park to develop plans for an increased cycling presence in a major city event, Hometown Days, one of the biggest events on the city's calendar. This two day party in the park features bands in the band shell and booths offering food, games, and other activities throughout the park, each booth being run by some city organization. Sonia had drawn up detailed plans for bike parking, a bike lane around the park, and other bike-friendly features for this event and wanted to go over them on site. As we worked on this project, people dropped by to chat and I soon realized that Sonya knew everybody: leaders of surrounding cycling organizations, city council members, and so on, and also had a network of friends and neighbors in San Carlos who she could call on for help. That was how she got things done. Not everything she proposed came to fruition, but a bike parade and a bike valet service did and both were a smashing successes. 

Another surprise, one very educational to me, was the emphasis of San Carlos Bikes on kids. Early in my involvement with them I attended one of the meetings the city had to take input on the Bike Plan. (San Carlos Bikes happened not to be present at this particular meeting.) There were several recreational cyclists there, some belonging to one or another of the local clubs (Pen Velo, Western Wheelers) and we all had the same reaction: upgrades to the infrastructure in San Carlos were not our highest priority. San Carlos is a fine place to ride because of its light traffic and friendly residents. It isn't particularly exciting, a recreational cyclist would rarely make a point of visiting San Carlos on a ride, but if you live there or are just riding through, it's fine, you probably wouldn't notice it one way or another. There were a few problems here and there, we all used the meeting to note them, but San Carlos was not first on anyone's list of cycling priorities. I mentioned this to Sonia some days later, and she started talking about her priorities, and most of them involved kids. How kids could safely bicycle to school. How kids could get to the places they liked to hang out. How kids could have bicycling adventures about which their parents could  feel comfortable. Just one example: half the High School students in San Carlos attend Sequoia High School in Redwood City. For many (most?) of these kids, there is only one relatively safe route for bicycling from San Carlos to school, Stanford Lane in San Carlos which turns into Warwick Road at the Redwood City boundary to Oakdale Street to Duane Street to school. That requires a short jog on Arlington Street to get from Warwick to Oakdale, a left on Arlington followed by a right on Oakdale. There is a curve in Arlington just before this intersection, limiting visibility. Also, the road is ever so slightly uphill at this point, not anything even the weakest recreational cyclist would even mention, but if you are a kid bicycling to school trying to make that left turn uphill from a standing start with limited visibility into traffic, it is scary. So Sonia got onto social media and reached out to her friends and contacts, and in a remarkably short period of time, Redwood City (not even Sonia's home town) had installed a four way stop at that intersection. Now the kids biking to school are safer, and quite frankly, even though I would never have asked for that stop sign, I feel safer as well. Most experts argue that it is at age 10, more or less, when kids can safely ride their bikes in traffic by themselves. At age 16 most of them will start driving cars. We all hope that they will acquire a life long love of cycling but certainly for those 6 years, cycling is their only option for freedom and independence. When we talk about complete streets (streets that also serve the needs of pedestrians and cyclists, not just cars) and cycling infrastructure, I now realize that kids are one of the major reasons this is important. 

I no longer live in San Carlos and am not currently a member of San Carlos Bikes. There are other cycling advocacy organizations in the area, the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition (SVBC) being an important one. I knew about SVBC before meeting Sonia, but it was Sonia who inspired me to join, and I remain a member to this day. Club bike rides are the last thing I am looking for in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, but if and when the world returns to normal, I will be looking to join the Western Wheelers, a club that Sonia brought to my attention. Not living in San Carlos, I probably will have much less exposure to The City of San Carlos' bike infrastructure but I now appreciate how critically important that infrastructure is to the children of San Carlos, and because Sonia and I have stayed in touch, I watch that infrastructure getting better and better. This improvement results from the efforts of many people, Sonia being one of the most important. I am very glad I saw that message from San Carlos Bikes on Facebook and as a result, learned what they are all about. Go San Carlos Bikes!