Rancho San Pedro is a public housing development owned and managed by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA) located in San Pedro, a neighborhood that is impacted by the congestion and pollution from the movement of goods to and from the Port of Los Angeles and Port of Long Beach. On Nov. 3, 2022, several staff from the Shared-Use Mobility Center’s (SUMC) California Team attended the exciting launch event of Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator’s (LACI) new e-bike program called Good2Go Bikes for community members who live at Rancho San Pedro.
SUMC serves as a co-administrator with CALSTART and CivicWell for the Clean Mobility Options (CMO) Program, which provided funding for the Good2Go Bikes program. SUMC provides technical assistance for awardees as they work through project planning. SUMC staff were able to support LACI in ensuring they met all the program requirements needed to launch their project and services.
The Good2Go e-bike program includes 16 e-bikes and four e-cargo bikes that residents living in Rancho San Pedro can check out. They can rent them on an hourly basis at $2 for the first hour and 50 cents for each additional hour. For more long-term use, residents can obtain monthly plans for $20 for 20 hours and 50 cents for each additional hour. The program uses a smartphone app where residents can reserve a bike in advance and use the it to unlock their desired bike.
The day started with old-school shared mobility with a carpool ride from the SUMC office in Little Tokyo to San Pedro. The launch event was hosted at the e-bike location, which is a small plot of land in front of the existing EV carshare vehicles available to community members. The e-bike program includes a gated structure that secures the bikes when not in use and a mobile kiosk where a student from Rancho San Pedro will be working part-time to provide assistance to those interested in using the program.
During the launch event, community members, media, and representatives from organizations involved in the project joined as speakers and as audience members, including SUMC. Speakers from LACI, HACLA, the Rancho San Pedro community, Pedal Movement, and California Air Resources Board (CARB) spoke about their excitement for the program, the benefits and need for such services, and what efforts went into launching the program. The event included an English-Spanish interpreter who helped community members feel more comfortable hearing about the program in their native language and allowed one of the community coach representatives, who spoke on behalf of the Rancho San Pedro community, to speak in Spanish.
Following the speeches, community members were invited to celebrate the opening of the services with food and beverages from Taquito y Mas. Pedal Movement had the e-bikes and e-cargo bikes available for demonstration rides for those who wanted to take a test ride. Some of us at SUMC wanted to get in on the fun and went around the block on a test ride of the e-cargo bike. Such services will be a great help to the community members interested in traveling short distances to work and school or to run errands such as buying groceries. The team at SUMC is looking forward to seeing what comes from the launch of services and supporting awardees like LACI to improve and grow their services to meet the needs of the expanding Rancho San Pedro community.
