Two years ago, Santa Monica launched Los Angeles County’s first public bike-share system and on Saturday, the city aims to celebrate.
From 10 a.m. to noon, join Santa Monica Mayor Ted Winterer for a community bike ride culminating with a brunch at the Albright on the Santa Monica Pier.
Breeze boasts some impressive statistics accumulated over the last two years. According to Breeze’s Facebook event:
“Together, we’re more than 77,700 Breezers
We’ve ridden over 607,000 trips
We’ve biked around the world 51 times (1,277,306 Miles)
We’ve burned the calories in 22,502 pizzas, and
We’ve prevented greenhouse gas emissions from 401 cars driven for one year from entering the atmosphere.”
Since Breeze launched, bike-share systems have been popping up throughout the region, including in Long Beach, on the UCLA campus, in West Hollywood, and even Beverly Hills.
The above systems all use the same model as Santa Monica’s: a smart-bike model as opposed to a smart-dock model. That means that the main computer is built in to the bike rather than in the stationary dock. This gives riders the freedom to tether the bike nearby if a docking station is full, rather than having to find another station with open slots.
Recently, Metro extended its bike-share system to the Westside. While the majority of Metro’s bikes on the Westside are in Venice, there are two docking stations in Santa Monica: one at the Downtown Santa Monica Expo station and the other at the 17th Street Expo station.
Because Metro Bike Share is a smart-dock system operated by a different company than Breeze, the two systems aren’t compatible.
