Bicycle Friendly Community workshop

As hard as it is to do, I will take a break from following the web coverage of the Tour de France on my lunch hour to pass along a few updates and links.

Since Spartanburg was designated as a Bicycle Friendly Community not long ago, several people have asked when Greenville plans to apply for designation. It has been discussed among the Spinners and within the City for a long time, but Greenville just wasn’t ready… until now. Next Tuesday, the process begins with a workshop to educate City officials and business leaders about the benefits of becoming a bike friendly city. We are very lucky to have Bill Nesper, the League of American Bicyclists’ Director of the Bicycle Friendly Community program, here in Greenville next week to conduct the workshop. This workshop is the first official step toward BFC designation, so I will let you all know how it goes.

I was looking through the July/August issue of G Magazine (I think it is only the second issue) and I was surprised to see a short article about colored bike lanes (scroll down to read it here). When Portland started implementing the colored lanes in intersections in 2005 (if I remember correctly), I mentioned it to Jason V. who was the Spinners advocacy chair at the time. He was immediately interested in sharing information about painted lanes with Mayor White and City Council, so I pulled together some statistics from studies in Denmark, Sweden, and Montreal where the colored lanes were already in use. I hadn’t thought much about it since then, but it is good to know that the City is still interested. Of course, this is something that would most likely happen in the distant future; we need more bike lanes before we can start painting them green through intersections. But hey, we are making progress in Greenville and I do believe we could see colored lanes or bike boxes here someday.

Since I mentioned G magazine, I should point out that the same issue had a great article about a Main street bicycle shop from the 1800’s and a nice profile of George Hincapie. The other content is great too, so I encourage you to pick up a copy if you haven’t seen it.

This isn’t related to Greenville, but NBC Nightly News did a story on bicycle commuting this week. They mentioned Portland and pointed out that 6% of daily commuters in that city use bicycles. They also mentioned that Portland has 170 miles of bike lanes (not an unrelated fact to that commuter percentage). As someone who has commuted by bike off and on for nearly 20 years, it is great to see this kind of coverage about transportational cycling in the national news. Interest in bike commuting nationwide is at an all time high, so we need to prepare for more bike commuters here in Greenville going forward.

Finally, I just want to thank the guy with the Parlee TT bike who gave me his spare tube before the Spinners time trail at Donaldson last night. It wasn’t the first time I have showed up for a race or event unprepared and it probably won’t be the last. I offered to pay him for the tube, but he said something like “hey, we’ve all been there.” Very true, I have given people tubes, patches, etc. and have also been the recipient of such generosity on many occasions (including last night). Without getting too sappy, I’ll just point out that those within the cycling community look out for each other and that cyclists, in general, are a generous bunch. Sorry I didn’t get your name, but thanks again for the tube. Without it I would have just been sitting on the side of the road watching everyone else ride.