El Cerrito/Richmond Annex Walk & Roll blog

If the car-lite lifestyle is to grow in popularity, it will need to be augmented with easily accessible rental cars, so you will not be deprived of out-of-town excursions or prevent you from running errands that require generous cargo space. But how can this need be satisfied in El Cerrito? A game changer is the arrival of GIG Car Share to El Cerrito! An affiliate service of AAA, GIG cars are distributed on streets throughout a service area such as El Cerrito. (In addition to the Bay Area, Sacramento and Seattle also have them). In El Cerrito you can now download the GIG app on your smartphone, view a map showing where cars are located in your neighborhood. You can select a car on the map, reserve it by pressing a button, walk to it, open it with your smartphone, and drive away. How to use GIG Car Share You'll pay with your credit card linked to the GIG app, based on the number of minutes, hours, or days that you rent the car for; rates are currently about 59 cents per minute, $1

America is stressed by high costs of living: housing, health care, education, and, with the decline of progressive taxation, a rising tax burden for the lower and middle classes. Meanwhile, for most American workers the purchasing power of wages has barely budged for 40 years. Transportation is one more straw breaking the camel's back. The American Automobile Association (AAA) says that in 2022 the average cost of car-ownership was $10,728 per year. That's a little over $894 per month. Forgoing ownership of a car by using GIG car rental as needed can be a huge cost savings. (Rates vary so check with GIG for current prices.) Since many people can commute by transit or bicycling and local errands can be done by foot or bicycle, GIG cars could be used for just those trips best done with a car. Let's add up a conceptual month using GIG instead of owning a car (prices are estimates): a weekend trip out of town ($240), a day-hike on Mt. Tam ($80), a shopping trip to Best Buy to

It's a frequent refrain: Older people don’t ride bicycles. But evidence throughout the world shows that is simply untrue. One needn't go further than the Ohlone Greenway to see plenty of bicycling seniors, with a growing percentage riding e-bikes. According to federal census data, a primary measure of mobility is commuting to work, but since retired seniors are not showing up as commuters, their mobility habits remain poorly understood. While we know that seniors are in fact bicycling, their safety needs are being ignored. Seniors' reflexes are slower, which makes safe bicycling infrastructure all the more critical to their mobility. But don't doubt that seniors ride bicycles! The photographs below show older people bicycling in Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Japan, and here in California.