Sherry Bloom (left) and Julio Averalo (right) pose with the free e-bikes they received through a Berkeley program. Credit: Waterside Workshops Rosemary Kim has been a regular biker for more than a decade, but there were some places she couldn’t reliably get to without relying on her car or a bus — like Tilden Regional Park or to her workplace in Richmond.
A few years ago, when her boyfriend bought an e-bike and raved about it, she began looking into purchasing one of her own, but quickly found that she couldn’t justify the high cost. Besides, she worried that it would be too heavy for her to carry up and down stairs each day.
So when she learned in spring 2023 about a new city program providing free e-bikes to low-to-moderate income residents , she jumped at the opportunity, submitting her application the same day a city newsletter announcing the program landed in her inbox. Kim, an acupuncturist who was living in North Berkeley at the time, was thrilled to learn she was one of 56 people chosen out of a pool of about 600 applicants to receive a new e-bike.
Kim’s commute to Richmond, which could take up to an hour each way before she received the e-bike, has shortened to about 20 minutes. And as she’s gotten more comfortable with her new bike, she’s accompanied her boyfriend on long-distance rides and even braved crossing Golden Gate Bridge amid “horrifying” heavy winds.
The Berkeley E-bike Equity Project (BEEP), a one-year-long, $270,000 pilot […]
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