Bicycling’s popularity zooms, but will it outlive the pandemic?
Joe Magee and kids Keaton, 3, and Tegan, 6, ride their electric cargo bike to the beach. The Hermosa Beach family bought the bike a year ago so they could leave their car parked on weekends. Photo Last month, after bike sales soared 300 percent over May 2019, Hermosa Cyclery partners Steve Collins, Ken Lieboewitz, Larry Burke and Mark McNeil stopped selling bikes and stopped answering the telephone. They were out of bikes. “The phone was ringing every minute. We couldn’t help them,” Collins said. Plus, he and his partners were too busy with rental customers to answer the phone. When the City of Hermosa closed its Strand, Hermosa Cyclery’s rental business collapsed and the shop laid off most of its 18 employees. The shop is a block off The Strand and a block north of Pier Plaza. “About half of our rentals are to tourists. But with the hotels closed, we had no tourists. And with The Strand closed, we didn’t want to rent to local families because we knew their kids would be riding in the streets and we didn’t want the liability,” he said. When The Strand and hotels reopened two weeks ago, one of the partners was stationed at the entrance to the rental area with a clipboard and, like…
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