When the Jaunt rental bikes showed up downtown I liked they were just randomly parked in places. They have a GPS tracker on them and an alarm system so they don’t have to be locked up anywhere. In other words, they don’t need to be parked by a bike rack. Not sure who suggested to Jaunt, because I am sure it was NOT their idea, that they now park the bikes by bike racks. First off, the obvious, this makes the bikes appear to be privately owned and locked to a rack and NOT available for rent, secondly, those bike racks are for people locking up their personal bikes, and since bike racks are in very short supply in this town, I am getting tired of moving beeping bikes to lock up my bike. MOVE THEM AWAY FROM THE RACKS AND DON’T LET SOME IDIOT BUREAUCRAT TELL YOU HOW TO RUN YOUR BUSINESS.
I had some friends tell me recently they wanted to try out an E-Bike before buying one, so they rented the Jaunts today and rode them the entire trail and said they worked great and they are going to go buy some e-bikes of their own.
In August of 2023, the Parks Board and the Active Transportation Board both said no to the expansion of e-bikes on the bike trail by still only allowing class 1s on the trail. Then, speed forward to February and March of 2024 and the Parks Board does an about-face and approves unanimously the right of class 2s to be rode on the bike trail, and simultaneous to this, so does the ATB by a 4 to 2 vote, and then it gets better, when one month later in April, Jaunt shows up at the Bicycle Committee meeting announcing that they are coming to town…. Oh, how nice…. I’m sure the PB and ATB reversal decisions were not corporate in nature, but rather for the good of the community…. Yah, right…. Plus, the police are not monitoring the trail anymore from what I can tell. I used to see them on the trail all the time, but I haven’t seen them on the trail since last spring. Where are they? Meanwhile, you have many e-bikers obviously exceeding the 15 mph speed limit on the trail and many of them are class IIIs, which are still not allowed on the trail…. 🙂 Oh, and also, how come Jaunt doesn’t want their customers riding their e-bikes on the sidewalks? The City doesn’t have a problem with that, so it begs the question: What does Jaunt know that the City doesn’t know about e-bikes, speed, and sidewalks? Would it have anything to do with liability, or should we say injury? OH, and I promise this is my last point, at the April Bicycle Committee meeting, Jaunt proudly proclaimed their bikes could go up to 25mph….. and that’s a good thing?…… Okay, so I have one more point, sorry, so if Jaunt is using up the racks which are meant for other bikes, then maybe this is another example of corporations getting their way at the expense of what is best for the citizenry…. #GuessWhoIsBuyingARadarGun 🙂 #SomeoneNeedsToEnforceTheRulesAroundHere
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I had a dream last night that Ted Cruz lost his senate seat in Texas…. We could all use more dreams like that…..