Quick Take
Santa Cruz could lead the nation in safe, active transportation — yet city leaders keep stalling, writes local bike enthusiast Brooke Secor. While e-bikes boom and collisions rise, officials have not added even basic protections for cyclists and pedestrians, pouring money instead into car-centric roads. Public programs like Biketober show demand for change, she writes, but without protected lanes, clear rules, and real investment, Santa Cruz’s green talk rings hollow. If the city truly values sustainability, she thinks it’s time to prove it.
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Santa Cruz has embraced e-bikes more than almost anywhere else in the country. Our climate, lifestyle and geography make year-round cycling ideal, and thousands of residents — many of them teenagers — now rely on e-bikes for daily transportation, taking cars off the road for part of the day. Rather than waiting for the state or county to decide what’s safe, Santa Cruz should lead the way in studying, legislating and responding to the challenges and opportunities of this growing mode of travel.
Instead, city officials recently chose to do nothing.
They declined to advance even the most basic safeguards, regulations or infrastructure improvements for cyclists and pedestrians, all while continuing to spend millions maintaining a road system designed to prioritize automobiles above every other mode of travel.
This is not leadership. It’s neglect.
In a recent op-ed, Kevin Norton and Dr. John Maa outlined why inaction is dangerous: collisions, hospital visits and near-misses are rising, and most involve cars striking vulnerable road users. Their analysis shows what many of us see daily — teenagers balancing backpacks on Class 2 e-bikes in mixed traffic with SUVs, families on bikes squeezed into unprotected lanes, and pedestrians dodging bikes on crowded sidewalks because there’s no safe space for them on the street.
They are right: This is a serious safety issue.
But it is also a public policy issue. Santa Cruz says it is committed to “mode shift” — the idea of moving people out of cars and onto bikes, transit and foot. Yet those words ring hollow when the city fails to provide even the basics: adequate bike racks, protected lanes and safe crossings.
Look around: We have crumbling shared-use paths under rusting guardrails, sidewalks that disappear mid-block, overflowing personal bike racks while BCycle’s corporate fleet gets priority parking. We also have the continued giveaway of public space to oversized vans owned by wealthy residents — while unhoused people are criminalized for the same offense.
These choices tell residents exactly what the city values, and it isn’t active transportation.
It is baffling that city officials have chosen not to create even the most basic safeguards or improvements for cyclists and pedestrians while continuing to pour funds into car-centric roadways. Parents allow minors to ride powerful machines in mixed traffic with pedestrians and cars, on paths and streets never designed for this use. Yet the city’s message seems to be: “It’s someone else’s responsibility to determine what is best for our city.”
If not now, when? Will it be better when thousands more residents move into high-density housing and discover that biking is easier than owning a car?
The contradiction becomes even clearer when we talk about safety. I have biked to work for more than two decades in cities like Chicago, Brooklyn, Portland, San Francisco and now Santa Cruz — always on a non-electric bike. I know what safe bike infrastructure looks like, and I know how dangerous it feels when it’s missing.
These days, watching the new wave of UC Santa Cruz students biking down Mission Street on BCycles sans helmet makes my stomach turn. Even confident, seasoned cyclists know Mission is no place to ride safely.
In the past three months — after more than 20 years of cycling daily without incident — I have been struck twice by distracted drivers while riding legally and predictably in bike lanes. These crashes have nearly broken my longstanding cycling habit.
In one incident, a Tesla driver pulled alongside me on Pacific Avenue, then abruptly turned into the bike lane to park — directly on top of me moments after passing. He struck me and drove away. When I reported it, police pulled him over but released him, claiming it was “plausible” he didn’t realize he hit me.
Apparently, in Santa Cruz, that isn’t a crime — even with Tesla cam footage clearly showing the impact.
In another incident, a driver on West Cliff Drive crossed the double yellow line to pass me as we approached a stop sign, then swerved across the unmarked bike lane to turn right without signaling, causing a crash. Neither driver stopped to check if I was injured, and both were unapologetic.
On West Cliff, the crumbling shared-use path pushes riders into traffic while the roadway lacks even basic sharrows, making conflicts like these inevitable. This isn’t bad luck — it’s a predictable outcome of poor policy, lack of infrastructure and weak enforcement.
The national picture is grim. Drivers struck and killed 7,148 people in the United States last year, enough to fill 31 Boeing 737s, according to a July report from the Governors Highway Safety Association. Pedestrian fatalities remain nearly 20% above the 2016 level and reached a 40-year high in 2022. Traffic collisions are the No. 1 cause of death for children ages 5-19 in the U.S. Federal support for bike and pedestrian safety is retreating, as President Donald Trump calls it “hostile to motor vehicles.”
If Washington is walking away, shouldn’t Santa Cruz step up?
We pride ourselves on being a progressive city, a community that acts locally when national leadership fails. So why, when it comes to protecting cyclists and walkers, do we retreat into silence and excuses?
Last week, Santa Cruz hosted its first-ever Week Without Driving, a campaign challenge encouraging residents to try life without a car and see how possible — or impossible — it can be given current options. Santa Cruz county also hosts Biketober, a countywide annual campaign with bike challenges, bike ‘n’ roll to school days, prizes and the opportunity to connect and share resources with the community to promote biking. Local organizations like Pacific for People are proposing to make parts of downtown pedestrian-only, a change that would benefit residents, businesses and visitors alike. These efforts show there’s a hunger for change. What’s missing is the political courage to make it happen.
The result of inaction is a troubling paradox: We say we want people out of their cars, yet we make cycling dangerous, confusing and inconvenient. We celebrate new housing without requiring protected bike access, and let developers check the “sustainability” box without meaningful standards.
The newly unveiled La Bahia Hotel & Spa, for example, provides no visible public bike racks — forcing customers and visitors to lock up to random pieces of street infrastructure, guard railings or pay a hefty bike valet fee. By contrast, 115 years ago, the site’s original La Bahia apartments accessed the beach via a triple-arched pedestrian bridge connecting neighboring Casa del Rey directly to Neptune’s Casino over the street and railroad tracks.
Over a century later, we’ve moved backward. Families are still being pushed toward car dependency, even as we claim to support alternatives.
This isn’t just policy — it’s a matter of trust. Every time leaders claim Santa Cruz is “committed to sustainability” but bow to astroturf politics when local issues spark debate, residents lose faith. Words without action discourage the change we need. They send a message to parents, teenagers and commuters: Don’t bother — this city won’t protect you if you choose a bike over a car.
Too often, it clings to old ways, ignoring what working people need to thrive and what our economy requires to be sustained or grow.
Yet the solution is within reach. Santa Cruz could choose tomorrow to become a national leader in active transportation. We could redesign West Cliff Drive as a safe, one-way street with protected space for bikes and pedestrians. We could repair and expand shared-use paths instead of letting them collapse under rusting guardrails while pouring funds into auto-centric streets. We could adopt simple, common-sense policies: requiring adults riding with children on Class 1 or 2 e-bikes to wear helmets, posting reasonable speed limits on multi-use paths like the rail trail, and educating and citing drivers breaking the law. Our city already regulates what vehicles are street-legal; why stop short of setting parameters for how e-bikes and cars safely share space?
True leadership means more than slogans. It means setting standards, building infrastructure and creating thoughtful rules to keep all road users safe. Santa Cruz should be proud to pioneer active, sustainable transportation. But until we align investments with values, our words will remain empty.
For the sake of the next generation — the teenagers riding e-bikes to school, the families trying to reduce car dependency, the seniors who would walk if they felt safe — let’s stop pretending and start governing with the urgency this moment demands.
Brooke Secor and her husband bike with their kids to school on calorie-powered bikes and champion biking, walking and public transit as family values — helping make Santa Cruz safer, healthier, more accessible and fostering the kind of community connections that can only happen outside of a car.