One Street News

March 2012

Vol. 5, Issue 3

  1. Event to Support Bicycle Ambassadors
  2. Resources – Interview with Enrique Penalosa
  3. Hot Topics – Fear of Cycling 

Event to Support Bicycle Ambassadors  

One Street’s City to Velo-city 2012 program is in full swing as we prepare for our fundraising event on Thursday April 26th in Prescott, Arizona. Event details are lining up better than we had hoped as that day falls immediately before Prescott’s famous Whiskey Off-Road mountain bike race when nearly two thousand bicycle racers are expected to descend on Prescott. Everyone will be thinking bikes! We hope they will also be thinking bicycle ambassadors. 

If you are in the Prescott area on April 26th, be sure to come by the Park Plaza Liquor & Deli on Goodwin Street. Our fun event kicks off at 6:00pm with bicycle games, photos and stories from last year’s City to Velo-city success, beer and wine specials as well as an auction and raffle to support this year’s ambassadors.

Three outstanding bicycle ambassadors will be joining us in Vancouver where the Velo-city 2012 conference will take place June 26-29. Greg Hull and Tracy Kwit are both staff members of Prescott Alternative Transportation (PAT). They spend most of their time on PAT’s Safe Routes to School program, but they also work on bicycle provisions throughout the area. Their tireless efforts to make Prescott a bicycling city made them easy choices for us.

For the third ambassador, the PAT team put their heads together and unanimously chose Justin Devine, PAT’s most active volunteer. Justin is an Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University student and seems to spend most of his free time helping PAT in whatever way he can. These three have made this year’s City to Velo-city bicycle ambassadors a dream team. We look forward to collaborating with them at the conference and beyond as they transform Prescott into a place where everyone wants to ride a bike.

 

Taylor Kuyk-White, One Street’s City to Velo-city program coordinator, has been hard at work arranging all the necessary elements that will result in this evening of bicycle fun. Already, event sponsors are stepping up to help ensure the trip’s success including Ironclad Bicycles, Hicks Dental Group, the Hotel Vendome and MadShirtz. We so appreciate their support and their commitment to improving Prescott for bicycling. 

If you would like to become a sponsor or donate directly to the City to Velo-city program, you can find the sponsor form on our City to Velo-city web page or just click “Donate Now” on the One Street site and note “City to Velo-city” with your donation.

Resources – Interview with Enrique Peñalosa 

As the former mayor of Bogotá, Enrique Peñalosa did more to improve bicycle, pedestrian and public transportation networks for his citizens than most officials could accomplish in a lifetime. Anyone who has heard Mr. Peñalosa speak treasures his inspiration for many years after. Unfortunately, few of his talks are available in video format. This video interview is the best we have come across for capturing his pride in the lasting changes he made for his city. Sit back, relax and prepare yourself for inspiration.  

Hot Topics – Fear of Cycling

By: Sue Knaup 

One of the most important papers I have my university students read is “Fear of Cycling,” by Dave Horton. I’m not trying to scare them away from cycling as the title might suggest. On the contrary, I use the article to show the long term effects of myopic bicycle programs that terrify. The article reveals why many people are already afraid of bicycling and the discovery is not at all flattering to bicycle advocates. The course I am teaching is called The Bicycle: Vehicle for Social Change and just like all bicycle advocacy efforts, its focus is on increasing bicycling, not scaring people away from bikes.

Too often, bicycle advocates grasp at cookie cutter programs that are pushed by government agencies and corporate industries that benefit from a general fear of cycling. If most people see bicycling as a dangerous activity then anyone who cycles can be blamed if a crash does occur. Incredibly, most other forms of transportation and recreation rank as more dangerous than bicycling, but none of them suffer like bicycling from a constant barrage of danger warnings. 

Bicycle safety training courses often start by listing all the dangers of cycling so that participants can’t help but leave the course wondering if there might be a better way to spend their time. Untold amounts of grant funding from governments, foundations and corporations is doled out to bicycle advocacy organizations to scare people into wearing a helmet every time they ride a bicycle. Even though car occupants and pedestrians suffer more head injuries in crashes, helmets are never pushed on these groups. Children are given brochures listing the dangers of cycling to take home to their parents. No one questions school bicycling programs with names such as “Arrive Alive” that suggest that any deviation from the bicycling safety instructions will result in death.

One Street’s mission is based on increasing bicycling, which simply cannot happen if most people fear it. Through our on-call support system we often coach bicycle advocacy leaders away from programs and messaging that instill a fear of bicycling. During such sessions I usually find that the leaders I’m working with had no idea that their program was undermining their efforts to increase bicycling in their community.  

Dave Horton’s article does an excellent job of introducing this concern, revealing the harmful effects of fearful programs and showing how to avoid these all too common approaches to bicycle programs.