What Do You Think of the Bike Corrals in Coronado?

Coronado’s experiment with bike corrals is drawing to a close. The trial period ends Nov. 30. 

By December or early January, city council will decided the fate of the eight corrals placed throughout the city. If you haven’t gone to the city website to comment on the corrals, you only have a few more weeks to do so.

Thus far the corrals appear to be a hit with cyclists, according to data.

“All of the people surveyed at the corrals liked them,” Anthony Colarossi, a city contractor said. “I only had one person saying anything negative.”

Colarossi has been observing the corrals since they were installed, visually checking to see how many bikes are parked in them and also surveying individual users.

While cyclist like the corrals, use has dropped off since the peak in July.  “We expected that,” Colarossi said.

And some are being used more than others.

The most popular site appears to be the one next to Panera on 10 Street and Orange Avenue. “You almost always see bikes there,” Colarossi said.

The Adella Avenue corral is also popular, but its use waxes and wanes. “One day you’ll see 10 bikes; the next day there won’t be any,” he said. “In the summer people liked to park their bikes there and walk to the beach, which is pretty amazing you consider how long a walk it is.”

Use of the corral in front of Coronado Brewing Company at Second Street and Orange Avenue also declined at the end of summer, though it is still popular on weekends, according to Colarossi.

While cyclist approve, voting with their voice and feet, comments on the website have been mixed. “There are people who hate them, people who love them, then there are the people in between who like them in some locations, but not in others,” said Jim Newton, staff liaison to the Bicycle Advisory Committee.

There’s a general sense that comments are split 50-50, but Newton couldn’t give an exact percentage, because no one has calculated the responses as of yet. He expects to do that after the survey ends on Nov. 30.

All he could say for now is that 211 people have responded to the survey, of those 86 percent identified themselves as residents.

Like corral use, survey responses have been uneven. “We received a lot of comments when the survey first went up,” Newton said. They spiked again after he presented an interim report to city council. Lately there has been “very little activity.”