Blog
The League’s Development Director, Lili Afkhami, shares her transformative cycling story, reflecting on her journey from being unable to walk up a flight of stairs to triumphantly finishing a half-Ironman triathlon — and urging riders of all backgrounds to never allow anyone to steal your joy in biking.
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Early last summer I began to notice some unusual symptoms when I was riding, and a decrease in my racing performance, but I had just had a physical and stress test, so I didn’t think much about it. I figured it was just due to getting older. Finally, after competing in a bike race at the National Senior Games in August I figured something must be wrong with me. I saw my doctor and explained my symptoms. He referred me to a cardiologist. To make a long story short, they found 80% to 90% blockage in two main arteries in my heart (one of which is called the “widow maker”) and I ended up getting 5 stents implanted in those arteries to open them up.
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Chema Hernandez Gil’s background is “in engineering, with a heavy dose of community and media activism.” A perfect mix for bike advocacy, right? Hernandez Gil is a community organization at the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, using both his engineering and community skills on campaigns for better infrastructure and on a collaborative program that gets reclaimed bicycles into the hands of low-income community members.
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Last year, at the California By Bike Summit, I was drawn to a session that asked a provocative question: “Who is mainstream?” Led by Miguel Ramos and Laura Torres from Multicultural Communities for Mobility in Los Angeles, the workshop examined the a complex topic: How can we connect the outcomes of bicycle advocacy with the inputs of diverse, previously overlooked communities.
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Last Friday I spoke to researchers, agency staff, and industry at the fall meeting of the Technologies for Safe and Efficient Transportation (T-SET) University Transportation Center (UTC) at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, PA. CMU and the University of Pennsylvania are partners in the US DOT funded UTC that is one of up to 35 UTCs that are funded under MAP-21 with up to $72.5 million per year being allocated to research on a competitive basis. The CMU/UPenn UTC has a strategic goal of safety.
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Curious about what federal funding programs can support biking and walking projects and programs? We have lots of resources on the programs available from the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA), and just last week, we released our new report taking a deeper look into funding opportunities from the Federal Transit Administration (FTA): “First Mile, Last Mile: How Federal Transit funds can improve access to transit for people who walk and bike.” Download the PDF of the report here.
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When Monica Garrison re-discovered bicycling as an adult, the attraction was instant — but something was missing. “I was becoming completely addicted to that full-on feeling of freedom and euphoria, [but,] as I rode around my town, I started to realize how very few African American women I saw riding,” she says.
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I had bikes when I was a kid, but I had only been on a bike once in the last 37 years. (I’m 55 now.) My sister bought me a bike at a garage sale last summer. Since September 2013 I have: Lost 30 pounds and 4″ off of my waist. Reduced the amount of blood pressure medicine I take by 50%
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Usually when you start a conference call, the participants chit chat for a few minutes as you wait for everyone’s voice to chime in. When we did our first planning call with James Rojas, the keynote speaker for Future Bike, things were a little different.
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(Part of our ongoing Building Blocks of a Bicycle Friendly Community series.) I’m going to come right out and say it: Cities that have bicycle program managers or bike coordinators are far more bicycle friendly than those that do not -– even when the same amount of resources are being devoted to improving conditions for bicycling.
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