Pedal Palooza brings bike safety, education to Santa Cruz bike riders

SANTA CRUZ - Santa Cruz bicycle lovers rode down to Pedal Palooza, a celebration of bike safety and education, at Bay View Elementary School Saturday.

Cyclists of all ages rode to the elementary school for bike education sessions, bike tuneups and the chance to win a free e-bike. The event, hosted by Ecology Action and the Santa Cruz Police Department, was in celebration of Santa Cruz County Bike Month throughout May.

Community partners like the Santa Cruz Natural History Museum, United Way of Santa Cruz County and the Santa Cruz County Regional Transportation Commission had tables with education about bike safety and bike laws in Santa Cruz.

Local bike shops such as Spokesman Bicycles, Epicenter Cycling and Urban Arrow also made appearances in showcases, where people could learn about and demo new bikes. The event also featured a station where people made their own smoothies with a blender powered by pedaling a stationary bike. Kids rode through a "bike rodeo," where they weaved through a chalk track to practice staying within the lines when they bike.

At the end of the day, kids showed off their multi-colored bikes in a bike fashion show, having used materials like pom-poms and yarn to decorate their bikes.

The event was made possible by a grant from the California Office of Traffic Safety, said Catherine Brothers, principal management analyst with the Santa Cruz Police Department. The grant money not only funds events like Pedal Palooza, Brothers said, but also supports programs like Ecology Action's classroom bike safety trainings.

"We find it really important because we know our community is big on different transportation modes and a lot of our community cares about the planet," said Katie Lee, a spokesperson for the city of Santa Cruz. "When you want to be on a bike or alternative method, we want people to be safe while doing it, whether you're a driver or a biker."

Lee said the Pedal Palooza event was a way to make bike education fun and engaging as an alternative to just watching a slideshow or reading a flyer.

Pedal Palooza is one of Ecology Action's several different events in May for its Bike Fest series, said Juan Castillo, youth program manager for Ecology Action.

Tackling transportation is essential in trying to take better care of the planet and environment by reducing greenhouse gases, Castillo said, and feeling safe with active transportation such as biking and walking is a key part to having people embrace non-car transportation.

"It really builds community when it feels like there's a sense of feeling safe to move around and have fun while you're doing it - it's just positives all the way around," Castillo said.

Dave Lawson, a vintage bicycle collector and Santa Cruz resident, showed off his bike collection at Pedal Palooza. Lawson has been collecting vintage bikes for over 30 years, and has bikes from as early as the 1930s in his collection, which he brought to the event.

"Anything to get people - especially young people - into riding bikes, I'm all about it," Lawson said. "If I can get them to be stoked on something different, especially some of these old bikes, even better."

The Santa Cruz Police Department had a booth helping people register their bicycles, so that if someone gets their bike stolen, the city and the police department can more successfully locate it, Brothers said.

Riders can register their bikes with the police department any time with the bike's serial number and receive a police department registration sticker, so when the department recovers a bike, officers can get stolen bikes back to people sooner because they can prove the bike's ownership.

Santa Cruz also has a historically high rate of serious injuries and fatalities between pedestrians and bikes, Brothers said. One way the police department tries to combat that is by focusing its time and resources on education and prevention services such as Pedal Palooza.

"There's a lot of energy and work being done to really help educate people and provide them with resources to know how to ride safely," Brothers said. "In Santa Cruz, we have so many different parts of the city putting their money and energy into this really amazing partnership."

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