 Welcome to In The Studio at Davis Media Access. I'm your host, Madeline Hamaguchi. Today, our subject is gonna be jump bike program. We have several groups of red bikes floating around town. They look a lot like the one in front of me that you're gonna see in a moment. And today to talk about this with me is city council member, Lucas Farrick. Say, Lucas. Hey, Madeline, how are you? Good to see you. Thank you. Yeah. I'm really excited about these bikes. Yeah. Obviously, growing up in Davis, you learn to ride a bike pretty much as soon as you can learn to balance and walk and everything. Exactly. And so the fact that this is made accessible to more people who may not be able to just own a bike or students that don't have the ability to have the bike in town with them, this is just really exciting. It's really cool. Yeah. Even, of course, even the city of Davis has a bicycle on its logo, right? Right, exactly. I mean, so it's, or for a logo. Right. Yeah, lots of major culture of biking here in Davis. So this seems like just a natural addition to the sort of toolkit of modes of transportation here in Davis. I also love how it urbanizes the Davis in general. Totally. It increases the community sharing and everything like that. Totally. But before we really jump into that, for those of you watching, what is the jump bike program? Yeah, so there's a region-wide bike share program. Bike share is taking off all over the US, certainly, but also all over the world. And so here in the Sacramento region, at the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, SACOG, I represent Davis on that Board of Directors, the Sacramento Area Council of Governments basically spearheaded this effort to bring a bike share program to the region. And so what it really consists of is, currently it's in Sacramento, West Sacramento, and then here in Davis. There are many other cities in the region that are also very interested in having it be expanded, certainly. But you see, we'll see a little bit here later, these red bikes jump as the company. And it is a partnership, though, between the regional governments, including City of Davis, but also the company that is social bicycles now and but they have these jump bikes and their electric assist bikes. You can still pedal them without electric assist, but they have this little kick to them and they can go up to about 15 miles an hour and they're located all throughout the region and they're really a lot of fun, but also they make getting to and from places a breeze. Yeah, exactly. I love the fact that in this transportation initiative that it encourages riders of jump bikes and of Amtrak to use them together. It's amazing that they're working together for that and then also the three cities down in between the Amtrak line, that's really great. Yeah, that's one of the things that is really an issue in transportation is that sort of issue of the first and last mile. So for example, someone gets off the train in downtown Davis at the station off the Capitol Corridor and then they have to go to UC Davis. Well, they have several options and many people actually just walk, but this provides an option where people can literally just get on their phone with the app, basically reserve a bike and then go straight to campus really quickly and so efficiently. So yeah, it's really fun and it's great. So you mentioned before too that the Sacramento Area Council of Governments was the spearheading organization for this particular program, but it sounds like it, for Davis in particular, there's a couple of person resources that also made this happen. So you and Jennifer D'Onofrio at the city. The city's bike head coordinator, Jennifer D'Onofrio, yeah. And Brian Abinot as well, who's a transportation planner for the city. And then there was a cooperative effort as well from UC Davis. Absolutely, oh yeah. Yeah, actually, that's one of the real ways that we have to sort of collaborate with the university in our sort of town and gown relationship is to basically make sure that this bike share program is a success across both the city and then the university. Yeah, that's great. So let's get down to a little bit more talking about the nitty gritty of the program and the bikes themselves. So there's, in terms of numbers, they started the program in May, middle of May, and dropping off, they dropped off 300 bikes. Yep, 300 bikes between Sacramento, West Sacramento and Davis. Right now, there are about 600 bikes that it's just doubled in size. And by the end of the fall, but there should be about 900 between Sacramento, West Sacramento and Davis. So in Davis right now, there are about 60 to 70 bikes at any one time. But we should be up to about 160 within the next couple months. Yeah, it's great, yeah. They're already very accessible, working in a city building. And so I love the fact that it's right outside. You can just walk around the corner. I was able to access this bike in a five minute or less walk. Yeah. So that's been... One thing that's amazing, I mean, one of the ways we see this is that you would sort of view something as a success or not is by the usage, right? How much they're actually getting used. And so bike share in other communities, the typical usage per day, one bike will be used essentially about twice per day, two to three rides per day. We are already seeing in the Sacramento region, including here in Davis, these bikes are being used on average six times per day. So people are really using them. They've made a splash and that people are really, really, really using them. Yeah. That's amazing. That's pretty cool, yeah. But I'm so happy to hear that. Yeah. That's cool. Yeah, and part of the thing that makes them easy to use is, or easy for them to be accessed by lots of people is that they're a simple machine in general. It sounds fancy with the electric assist petting and pedaling and the location technology on your phone and everything. Right, exactly. That's how you rent these bikes is you download the app. There's a jump app. And I believe also you can access the bike rental through Uber. Yep, exactly. So you have a couple of different options there. And so you pay electronically. And everything else is just contained within the bike. So let's take a look at the bike itself a little bit, point out some features. We do have your basket with, there's even a cup holder inside for all of the coffee addicts around town or water bottle holders. We have very basic handlebar brakes. They're not too far away and they're easy to squeeze. We have the electric assist pedals or I guess regular pedals. Right, exactly. On some bikes. Yeah, there's an internal hub that helps with the electric assist. Yeah, it's great. We have this module at the back is a solar panel to charge, keep the bike charged. All right, actually the solar panel actually keeps the computer running. Oh, that's great. It sort of charges the computer, yeah. Cool. And the lights too, yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. The front and back lights, yeah. And so you don't have to provide your own tail light or any of your own equipment, really. You even have a U-lock. You'll see it in a moment when we're gonna reserve this bike right here in the studio. Also, one of my favorite up there in the handlebar is the... Oh, right. The open bell too, so right there. So great. It's pretty cool. And then at the back, we have your push button keys. So it's not touchscreen, which actually is good to maintain and things like that. So they're fairly easy to operate. They have a fairly good turn radius, a little shorter than normal bicycles, but you go so fast, it feels like you're riding a miniature motorcycle or scooter. Yeah, exactly. So they can actually, the electric assist bikes, they can go up to 20 miles per hour, but we in the Sacramento region have modulated them to max out at 15 miles per hour. 20 miles an hour is a lot. It was pretty fast, you know, especially on a bike. So if you're in traffic or on a bike path or something, so yeah. It's interesting too that the, so they're pretty inexpensive as well too. So it's a dollar cost for a 15 minute ride. So or four dollars per hour. So usage. Right, right. And so it's a lot of people use them for sort of short trips, right? So, you know, you're, you know, going right into the grocery store or running off to a meeting or, you know, going from the train station to campus or whatever. So, you know, it's you're probably not going to be necessarily on a bike all day long, riding around people do, do do that certainly. But so it's pretty, you know, the cost is not too much as well. That's great. Right. And the fact that there are so many means that, you know, guilt-free you can just, you can leave it at a bike rack or at a hub. There are a couple of main rules with jump bikes for safety and for courtesy. One is that you do need to be an adult and you should be 18 or older. I believe it's around it. Yeah, that's correct. And it is advisable always that you wear a helmet. Yep. But that is something that you're going to have to supply yourself. Right, exactly. And then for maintenance and courtesy, we should park these bikes at bike racks or in the app, you'll see that there are incentive. There's that they're, that they incentivize you to leave them at certain hubs. Yeah. On the screen, you'll see a collection of jump bikes right up there. That's great. Yeah, if a bike is running low on a charge, right? It's electric charge. It will show you on the app that it is running low, but the app will show you, if you bring the bike back to this certain, it'll have a little sort of charging indicator. Like a little green blob. And why don't we start that up right now? Actually, I'll break out my phone and let's see. So I have an iPhone with me, but there is the same app on Android as well. So I don't know about Windows phones. So when you start up the app, it's going to look something like this. There's a map. In this case, a map of Davis. And it shows all these red dots where the locations of all the available bikes are. Right. So there is a bike right in front of us. You can see that there is a blue dot on the map as well. It works just like regular GPS or Uber or something like that. And so we have the bike right here. And I'm just going to say reserve this bike. And you can confirm. Please wait. And then this bike, when you get close to it, this screen on the panel that we were looking at before, you wake it up. And sometimes it will just detect your phone when you're close. Right. And then it's going to ask you for a pin. And so the pin number, if you look at the screen, as this is a mini tutorial here, on the upper right-hand side of the map, it's going to give you a pin number. And great. Yeah, you enter the pin and you can hear that the lock unlocked. Exactly. So you take out, it comes with a very large U-lock, which makes it easy to lock anywhere. Yeah. You can, yeah. You just put it here. And on the screen of my phone now, it's a readout of how long I've been renting it and how far I've gone. And then how much it's cost, basically. The other thing I really love about this app is how easy it is to report a bike that is broken, is needs a charge, if something's wrong with it, or if a bike isn't where you think it's going to be, things like that. There have been, everyone has pretty much been pretty happy with the system so far. I would say the one set of complaints that we've heard is that some people will park a bike in the sidewalk and not actually lock it to a bike rack or something. And so it can really impede flow of pedestrian traffic, especially if someone has limited mobility or maybe in a wheelchair or something. That would be difficult to have to navigate around. So the city of Davis, and Sacramento as well too, but the city of Davis has required that the bikes be actually locked to a bike rack, any bike rack, not just a jump bike rack. But if you find a situation where a jump bike has just been left on a street or somewhere in your neighborhood, you can report it to customer service. And they are very quick about making sure that it gets taken care of. I've actually seen those jump bike fans come around and clean up and fix, and it's great to see that they're being taken care of. Exactly, yeah, that's great. I believe that we were running out of time, but I really enjoyed this. Thank you so much for joining us. Oh, thanks so much for having me appreciate it, yeah. And thank you so much for watching in the studio at Davis Media Access. We hope to see you next time. And don't forget to rent a jump bike when you're out and about in downtown Davis.