Bicycle Friendly Community
Today the League of American Bicyclists announced 55 new and renewing Bicycle Friendly Communities (BFC). With this new round, 69 million people live in a Bicycle Friendly Community as the program extends to all 50 states. These new awardees join a leading group of more than 325 communities in all 50 states that are improving health, safety and quality of life in cities and towns nationwide.
This week, my colleague, Steve Clark, wrote about his experience riding with Cherokee Schill and the conditions she faces while biking to work in Kentucky. Her fight for her right to road reflects our society’s decisions about how we create roads, how we create laws for those roads, and the culture of safety we choose to create for our roadways. So what’s the legal background for her fight? And are their signs of hope for Kentucky’s future? Keep reading…
I used to think I was about as fearless and empowered as any cyclist out there. Then I rode with Cherokee Schill. When I was in Lexington, Kentucky recently for a Bicycle Friendly Community visit, I rode with Schill, a woman who’s been ticketed and even jailed for biking to work in the travel lane, rather than the shoulder, of a busy state highway.
Initiated in 2010, Slow Roll is a mass bicycle ride that takes place every Monday night in Detroit. Last month, I was able to join the Slow Roll, riding through the Motor City with more than 4,000 people, experiencing the bicycle as truly a great equalizer, a device that can bring us together: one gigantic, happy family of humankind.
(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.
The most bicycle friendly places are those that adopt city ordinances to help improve or promote bicycling. One easily visible example is a bicycle parking ordinance like the one in Santa Monica, Calif., which not only ensures an adequate supply of racks at destinations, but also requires event organizers to have monitored bicycle parking for 200 – 250 bikes if attendance is expected to reach 1,000 or more (requiring 3 attendants).
In all my travels, I’ve seen a lot of great things on the street, from green lanes to bike boxes. But those high-profile facilities are the result of something far less visible: words. For a truly Bicycle Friendly Community, before you can put paint to pavement, you need the laws and policies that legitimize and encourage safe cycling.
All eyes were on New York City last year, as they launched the nation’s largest bike sharing system. With strong female ridership in places like Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis, there were high hopes that bikesharing in the Big Apple would boost the number of women biking. So the release of data showing Citi Bike skews heavily male left some folks scratching their heads.
Yesterday, I talked about the “WOW” of Bicycle Friendly Communities. Perhaps the most important part of that “WOW” factor, is the “win-over projects.” I call them “win-over projects” because they tend to cause people to turn their heads (maybe even scratch their heads) and get them thinking that maybe bicycling could start working for them. The communities that are really seeing growth in bicycling have done something big and beautiful that people can’t help but notice. I’ve pulled together some of the best “win-over projects” I saw during my trips to Memphis and mutli-city tour of California.
At some point during nearly every Bicycle Friendly Community visit, I find myself saying, “Wow!” Sometimes it’s late into a visit and might have nothing to do with infrastructure or city policy at all — like seeing a carpenter hauling a load of lumber in a hand-built wooden trailer behind his bike, or witnessing an empowered cyclist take the lane on a high-speed state highway during rush hour.