‘Something Just Happens When You Roll’
Cycling Without Age Teams Up with Santa Barbara Artists
By Nick Welsh | April 24, 2025
Read more of our 2025 Earth Day cover story here.
Some people are said to radiate infectious enthusiasm. With John Seigel-Boettner, he’s more like a one-man epidemic. “Something just happens when we roll,” exclaimed Boettner, a retired middle school teacher now pushing 70, but still going very strong.
A born-in-the-bone bike nut who used to lead his students on long cross-country bike adventures, Seigel-Boettner has since launched — in 2018, right before COVID struck — a Cycling Without Age chapter in Santa Barbara. That initiative has taken off. The organization now boasts 91 other volunteer “pilots” to ferry older adults around on one of the group’s 17 electric powered trishaws. On any given week, about 40 such rides happen.
When Seigel-Boettner and his trishaws hit the road, their passengers share an upholstered front-seat bench. In that moment, they breathe in the sun and bathe in the wind; they are in motion, basking in the great outdoors. Passersby can’t help but stop, stare, and grin. Many of them wave.
One UCSB student was moved to lift her head out of her cell phone and wave her arm, and she then went back into the phone to Google “riding old people on bicycles.” That’s how she tracked down Cycling Without Age and has since become a pilot herself. “It’s just one of those things that’s really powerful,” said Seigel-Boettner, shaking his head in wonder. “And when was the last time someone waved at you?” he asks. “I pinch myself.”
In the past five years, Cycling Without Age has been getting a lot of pinching from other people too. The group recently became the focus of a celebratory documentary now making the rounds at regional film festivals. And next month, Seigel-Boettner — who wears a cap bearing the inscription “Do Good” and a T-shirt quoting the mystical kindness of Mr. Rogers — said there will be a grand unveiling of seven new roadworthy trishaws, each one painted by different Santa Barbara artists.
Among the better-known artists involved is the ubiquitous Jeff Shelton, who knows how to make art smart, fun, and immediately accessible. Also involved is Blair Looker, a longtime Santa Barbara painter who helped launch the I Madonnari Chalk Festival; an artist now in his eighties who once worked for Disney; and, representing a younger perspective — are two artists from the Eastside, one with Chumash ancestry and the other part African American.
The whole art-on-wheels thing happened when Seigel-Boettner got together with Roman Baratiak, a lifelong bike rider himself and former head of UCSB’s Arts & Lectures. “There was no theme,” explained Seigel-Boettner. “We wanted to just let the artists run.”
Baratiak helped with the grant writing as well as the brainstorming; thanks to his handiwork, Santa Barbara Beautiful kicked in enough to underwrite the costs.
On the first Thursday of May, all the painted pedicabs will amass on the front pavilion recently installed outside the downtown public library. After some music courtesy of the Middle Eastern Music Ensemble, the seven new trishaws will make their maiden voyage down State Street to the beach, and then back again.
Seigel-Boettner’s ultimate fantasy is for the trishaws to take off on the city’s Eastside. As a kid, Seigel-Boettner’s father was principal of Franklin Elementary School, and as a young man out of school, he worked for the architectural firm that designed the Eastside Community Center. “I really want to see the abuelas from the Eastside in these things,” he said. “That’s what I’m hoping for.”
Wherever they roll, and however they’re painted, the trishaw rides offer an experience akin to magic. To and from, people wave. To and from, they smile. For a moment, the wind’s in their hair. For some, it may be their last ride. For others, it’s a reminder they’re still alive.
Or as Seigel-Boettner — a true bicycle mystic — put it again, “Something just happens when you roll.”
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