Bicycling Toward Community

Two summers ago my wife Kate and I caught the cycling bug.

After years of ignoring our rusting bikes, something made us buy new road bikes (a terrific sale at a local shop) and begin riding around Addison County, Vermont, where we live.

Maybe it was friends, often couples, extolling the virtues, sheer fun, excitement and satisfaction of cycling. Maybe living in Vermont’s Champlain Valley influenced us: we are surrounded by world-class bicycle touring country.

Whatever the original impetus, we find ourselves, midsummer of our third year in the saddle, more committed than ever to this singular mode of travel and transportation. We’ll spend one August week of our vacation touring and camping in the Finger Lakes Region of New York State with two other couples. Increasingly, we bike every chance we get.

What’s this got to go with community?

It revolves around an increased desire among many Americans to do more and more errands around town on their bikes, to make their towns more and more bicycle friendly, and to encourage local transportation and planning policies that support the safe sharing of streets among cyclists and drivers.

In my case, it also turns on encouraging more teens in town to take up bicycling. Our local teen center’s latest fund-raising event is its annual October Tour de Teens, a day-long cycle-fest in which folks of all ages pledge to bike in support of the teen center, and then come together toward day’s end for a blow-out pig roast celebration and prizes on the Village Green.

There are three routes: an 8-mile circuit for smaller children and families, a 26-mile loop for the more ambitious, and a 54-miler for the hardcore cyclers; something for everyone.

This October, the second annual Tour de Teens will feature bright-green painted bikes donated to the center for the teens’ use in the Tour and all year long. The more bikes donated (and painted green), the more teens will ride from their teen center to other neighborhoods of town, or from school to the center, or from the center back home. When dozens of bright green bicycles are parked in bike racks or seen whizzing through town, people will start to notice.

And I’d put money on a few results: greater awareness of the positive role of teens in our town, heightened commitment bike safely, the benefits of bicycling to health and a healthier planet, and the good fun of getting around under your own steam. Those are a few ingredients of healthier, stronger communities.

Heart & Soul Community Cycling, anyone?