At first glance, this picture may irk many of you. It is yet another pesky shared bike parked in a way that is disrespectful, in this case blocking the Highway 87 bike path in San Jose. We agree and will continue to work with bike share and scooter companies to prevent the haphazard parking of bikes. (See below for a list of where to contact to report irresponsibly parked shared transportation devices.)

I see something else, however. I see a shared ebike parked at the entrance to a homeless encampment. I’m making some assumptions here but I think it’s safe to conclude that someone who lives in this encampment has a bike share membership. I’m excited about that. Why? Because it means that Bay Area wide efforts to make bike share more accessible to poor people are working, that the $5/year annual bike share membership that SVBC works hard to sign people up for is working. In fact, at the end of last year, SVBC enlisted 140 new low income people, 140 towards our goal of 200 by June of this year.

What I see here is a fulfillment of SVBC’s mission. That mission is not to promote bikes for the sake of bikes. It is to promote bikes for the sake of building a better community. In my previous role working in affordable housing, one of the challenges I heard from those living outside was transportation. In this case, a bike is being used by someone who likely cannot afford a car to get to their job or wherever they need to go. The bicycle and bike share creates an affordable mode of transportation. It’s not perfect and there is much to be critical about in the pictures below but there is good news.

What else do you see? And how can SVBC be helpful in bringing its mission to bear in a society that pedals past homeless encampments such as this on a daily basis?