Biking is all the rage these days. While it’s always been popular in beautiful cities and environmentally aware cities, biking saw its numbers get a boost last year when gas prices drove a lot of people who might otherwise has remained in their cars. But Sausalito is experiencing a wave of bicyclists which goes beyond the mere improvement in biking and the town is feeling the negative effects of being the endpoint in tourists’ biking sightseeing trips from San Francisco.
While Sausalito depends upon tourism for its economy, some residents are complaining that the biking tourists’ numbers have reached a critical point, and are suggesting that the tourists and their bikes are becoming town clutter, creating traffic issues, sprawling out and dominating the public parks, and being haphazardly parked blocking sidewalks and doorways. The culprit for the surge is the recent spate of bicycle rental shops that have come on line peppering Fishermen’s Wharf.
Despite the slowing tourism, those who are coming, are biking and this niche of San Francisco tours is actually experiencing growth where most other businesses are fighting to survive during the recession. It would seem that biking has become a mainstream tourist activity, possibly as a result of more people biking in their home cities and utilizing city bike share programs which many large cities around the world are adopting. The bicycle rental business has doubled its business numbers in San Francisco for both of the last two years and on peak days the city can rent fifteen hundred bikes. A large percentage of those tourist riders are determined to do only one thing on their bikes; ride over the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge will experience six thousand bicycle crossings on busy summer days. And once many of the cyclists have crossed, veering to the right toward Sausalito is about the only option for the casual rider. Going straight on through the tunnel is prohibited on bicycle, and taking a left would lead them up a steep hill to a peak which only hardcore cyclists can manage. As most of these cyclists end up riding in with plans to catch a ferry back to San Francisco, there is often a lot of bike parking as they hop around the shops and then wait around along the waterfront and the few green spaces waiting for the ferries.
City officials are looking at ways to address the problems being created so that residents and tourists can coexist in harmony. The city is posting more signage around the town with information and instructions, sprinkling bike racks around town so that the bikes don’t clutter the sidewalks, doorways and parks, increasing the ferry schedules or allowing a another ferry service to participate, and even exploring a service which would transport cyclists and their bikes back to San Francisco by truck for a small fee.
