Spin Cyclists
Some thoughts on Baltimore's biking future--from the people who do it everyday
By Bret McCabe - City Paper
The City of Baltimore's official Bike Blast takes over Druid Hill Park this Saturday, April 25, with a day's worth of activities and information aimed at advocating cycling in the city. The event is the latest in an ongoing, and ever-so-slightly increasing, number of city efforts to make Baltimore a more bike-friendly urban environment, an effort that feels to have begun in earnest when the Bicycle Master Plan was developed by the Department of Planning in 2006. These efforts have been visible--the emergence of designated bike routes, sharrows, signed routes, and floating bike lanes; the addition of bike racks on all city buses; the production of safe-cycling PSAs; and the addition of Nate Evans as the city's Bicycle and Pedestrian Planner. Promoting cycling appears to be an element of the city's sustainability planning. And, just looking around, it looks like the number of Baltimoreans cycling is increasing.
"I think the city's doing a pretty good job of trying to promote biking, not just as a recreational activity but also as a transportation alternative," says Boson Au, a 31-year-cyclist and member of the Velocipede Bike Project, a collective-run, nonprofit bike shop-qua-cycling advocacy effort. Au is joined by six of his fellow collective members inside the Project's Station North Arts District workshop area on a refreshingly pleasant April Friday afternoon, sitting in metal folding chairs with the space's doors open. Almost everybody here pedaled in from some part of the city.
"Biking fits well with the city's green efforts, and to get people out of their houses and exercise," 28-year-old Gabby Vigo notes, alluding to the city's Fit Baltimore campaign.
"You see what's happening in the city because of this push," Au continues. "And a lot of different cities are doing the same thing, talking about transportation issues--I mean, cities are trying to break into the 'Top Biking Cities in the Country' lists. So I think the general national consensus is trying to get something besides cars on the road, and it's trickling down to Baltimore."
It's a sentiment shared by the group gathered, as are the many reasons they spout off when asked about what makes Baltimore a good city for cycling: its compact size, that its few hills aren't intimidating, that for the most part you can do it year round, that it's more expedient for a large part of distances around the city, that, well, the present public transportation system can be frustrating and tedious. But very quickly this conversation starts to run into the many facets of Baltimore that make it less user-friendly, aspects well known to anybody who uses a bike as his or her primary mode of transportation. And it's these aspects, both macro and micro urban issues as a whole, that need to be addressed and discussed to help get more people biking in the city and push Baltimore into a more progressively moving urban environment.