I wander the Sea Otter Festival Expo area looking for interesting new products that fall outside of the mold of manly mountain biking bling with big gnurly tires that dominate at this outdoor event, so for Sea Otter 2022 this Bluejay electric cruiser step-through bicycle nicely appointed with racks and a sidecar caught my attention, and of course I had to learn more.

Besides the bikes of Sea Otter, I’m especially interested in the people of Sea Otter. In this photo, Bluejay CEO Jennifer Cohen Bogan stands behind the bike she designed from her office in Marin County, California, and her backstory fascinated me.M

Many bike industry people are bike nerds. People like me, and people like many of you who read Cyclelicious. Maybe they were athletes, or they love outdoor activities, or they have a proclivity for mechanical gizmos and googags.

Ms Bogan took a different path. She was a marketing executive in beauty , fashion, and cosmetic businesses. She took time off to spend time with her children when she saw families riding electric bicycles around town. She tried these bikes and loved their ease of use, but disliked their looks.

She started Bluejay to create functional yet on-trend electric bicycles. Their display at Sea Otter evokes picnic rides and family getaways.

If you’re at Sea Otter, I invite you to find their booth not far from Dippin Dots cart. Bluejay began in 2018 and, like many outdoor businesses, sold bikes like crazy during the first eighteen months of the pandemic. They’re building out their dealer network, or you can buy online and have a bike shipped to a shop for assembly.

For more from Sea Otter 2022, I invite you to follow me on Twitter.

I’m at the Sea Otter Classic 2022 where I see an incredible sea of vendors at the festival.

Sea Otter began as and remains primarily a mecca of mountain biking activities and gear, but for 2022 I see what might be a decent presence of companies showing bikes suited for utility use. I plan to look at bikes from Bluejay Bikes (they have one with a sidecar this year and it’s so gorgeous), UBCO (a New Zealand company that makes electric bikes for use on the farm), Benno “Etility” Bikes, Magnum Urban Electric Bikes (with step through models!), Bombtrack Urban Bikes, and more.

I was unable to attend the Sea Otter bike advocacy summit that took place during the first half of this week, but I heard some interesting things about it. Spoke Safety presented their vision for connectivity so that vulnerable road users can participate in V2V collision avoidance networks now under development. They’ll demo their tech in which bike riders will mix it up with an Audi e-tron on a test track. I’ll interview the CEO of Spoke Safety this Friday, and I have my own thoughts regarding the application of Internet-of-Things technology to improve cycling safety, but I’ll save that for its own post.

Besides purely utilitarian riding, I still quite enjoy recreational road riding so watch for my quick thoughts gravel and road bicycles in this space and on my Twitter. While I’ll likely mention the overwhelming presence of e-bikes at Sea Otter, I won’t dig too in-depth beyond a “whee, this is really fun.” For the nuts and bolts and practicalities of e-bike riding and ownership, I invited you to visit the brand new eBike Chick Blog.

If you want to attend, you can buy a one-day pass for $25 either online or at the venue, but note that lines for pass sales can be very long. If you plan to demo bikes, you need to sign the waiver electronically. Parking is $50 per day. There’s no transit to Laguna Seca. You can expect a challenging bike ride up the hill from either Highway 68 on A Road, or up Boundary Road from General Jim Moore Boulevard, but once you arrive you’ll find a large valet bike parking area.

In which I discuss public transportation because I used it to get around during a big bike event.

No transit agency in the technology-heavy San Francisco Bay Area supports tap-and-pay contactless fare payment using bank cards; you have to use the proprietary stored value Clipper Card or their Clipper App. The Los Angeles area has their TAP card — again, a proprietary stored valued card. But which California transit agency allows you to use the chipped bank card you already have in your wallet, or the open payment app on your phone?

The first California transit agency to offer contactless bank card fare payment as you board the bus is Monterey Salinas Transit (MST), a small, scrappy lifeline service with a $42 million operating budget covering 300 square miles of mostly rural Monterey County.

I was in Monterey County for the Sea Otter Classic this past few days so I made use of the local transit. MST has a complicated, distance-based fare system that historically involved the driver having to remember who paid for what distance. While looking for their current fare information so I could arrange to have exact change, I was thrilled to learn they now have contactless payment. I tapped my chipped bank card when I boarded, and tapped again when I disembarked for the proper fare payment that accounted for my distance traveled. It’s so easy peasy.

This was done as a pilot through the California Intergrated Transit Project, which seeks to simplify the transit riding experience for both riders and providers. According to their project launch press release, MST is the first in California to offer tap-and-pay fare payment using smart credit and debit cards.

Since then, Sacramento Regional Transit began offering the same service for light rail rides, also in partnership with CalITP. Hurray when transit agencies make payment easier for visitors, occasional users, and first time users.