Home / Belmar / Featured / Transportation / Low Speed Vehicle Rentals Coming to Belmar
If you wanted to take a spin in one of those fun-looking, all-electric Low Speed Vehicles, you’ll soon get your chance! An LSV rental concession is coming to Belmar in the spring of 2009. The Mayor and Council recently awarded a concession license to Beach Creek Cruisers to operate the concession. The Beach Creek Cruiser folks, father and son team, John Grace, Sr. and John Grace, Jr. (pictured above), had a very successful first season offering LSV rentals in Stone Harbor last summer, and are excited to be expanding their operation to Belmar in 2009.
The Graces are parterning with Bart Yarnold, the proprietor of the Shark River Kayak Company, to offer the rentals this summer from the Belmar Marina. Bart and his wife, Brenda, already operate their kayak rental and eco-tourism business from the Activities Pier located near the marina’s fuel dock. The Borough’s Department of Public Works will be building a booth similar to the Belmar Tourism Commission’s boardwalk information booth, that will be manned by the Yarnolds and other tourist-related concessions the Borough hopes to attract to the marina. Not only will transient boaters be able to make reservations for an LSV when they reserve a weekend or overnight slip this summer, but visitors who come to Belmar by train will even be able to arrange to have their LSV waiting for them at the Belmar Train Station.
Because of the mobility LSVs offer, the Borough hopes that more people will be willing to travel to Belmar by train, knowing they can have easy access to local transportation if they decide they want to visit another community in the area. (The Borough hopes to offer even broader mobility solutions one day soon by making car-share vehicles availabe at the Belmar train station and elsewhere in town through NJ CarShare, a statewide carsharing program, similar to PhillyCarShare and Zipcar, being developed by New Jersey Transit.)
The Belmar-Beach Creek Cruisers relationship got off to an auspicious start. After several weeks of email exchanges and phone conversations, the Graces visited Belmar to meet with Mayor Pringle on a cold, dreary November day last fall. You can imagine their surprise when he when he took them on a tour of the town in his own LSV, and he showed the pair — who are used to having to explain to elected officials what a "Low Speed Vehicle" is — that Belmar’s marina is already equipped with a series of 5 LSV charging ports at the marina. These charging station were installed in the spring of 2008 during DOT-funded upland improvements to the northern section of the marina parking lot. This feature was inluded in anticipation that one day the Borough, with the financial assistance of advertising sponsors, would furnish LSVs for the use of the transient boaters visiting the marina.
