Greenville City Council’s first vote on the Bicycle Master Plan is less than a week away, so please email a letter of support if you haven’t already.
Speaking of the Master Plan, I encourage you to pick of a copy of the September issue of Go Magazine (and not just because the back of my leg is featured on the cover). The issue features a good article by Gary Hyndman about the Bicycle Master Plan, which I think does a good job of expressing the community support for better bike infrastructure, and safer streets, in Greenville. As City Councilmember Amy Ryberg-Doyle says in the article, “the people have spoken. This is not a top down initiative.”
The recent SCDOT Pelham/ Roper Mountain resurfacing projects are also mentioned in the article. Neither of those roads will get bike lanes…a fact that still frustrates me quite a bit (more on that later). Hopefully once the BMP resolution is passed though, SCDOT will pay more attention to their own “Bicycle Accommodation Policy” and include provisions for bikes as part of resurfacing projects in the Greenville area. With both of those recent paving projects, we missed a great (cost effective) opportunity to include bike lanes on roads that are included in the plan, but there will be future opportunities as well.
While I am posting, I want to mention the Joyride reception with Mia Birk, which occurred just over a week ago. Overall, I think it was a big success. Around 200 cyclists attended (the bike racks in front of the Greenville Little Theater were packed), and Mia’s presentation was very encouraging. Personally, it was good for me to hear her perspective, and to step back a bit and look at our accomplishments in Greenville over the years. I have been somewhat involved in bicycle advocacy efforts here for the past seven years, and though it is easy to be discouraged by setbacks (like the one I mentioned in the above paragraph), we have come a long way and the small successes along the way are worth celebrating. Mia took notice of the good things happening in Greenville, saying this via
Great to hear! Now let’s just build on that and make Greenville an even better place to live and ride a bike.
…and check out Mia’s book if you haven’t already. It is encouraging to hear stories the stories about Portland in the 90s and realize that the opposition we sometimes face here is not unique.
For more about Mia’s tour of South Carolina, check out this post at the PCC blog.
1 comment:
Nice article. Noticing current Greenville bike infrastructure, It needs to be safer and larger. I will be submitting a post about it on a GreenvilleBlogger site, to be more specific to what I think Greenville needs with bikes. Maybe, throwing interesting facts about Holland bike infrastructure and usage.
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