EVENT: Bike Newton, May 18, 2008, 1:00PM Making Newton a Bicycle-Safe City

Bike Newton: Making Newton a Bicycle-safe City", sponsored by Green Decade Coalition Newton, will take place on May 18, 2008 (Sunday), 1 pm at Newton CIty Hall War Memorial steps. The main speaker will be Anne Lusk, PhD, Harvard School of Public Health. Some Newton Police officers will provide a demonstration of instructive and skillful bicycle maneuvers.

The purpose of the rally is to demonstrate substantial and serious grassroots support for improved bicycle safety in Newton. Of course, it will also be an entertaining and congenial event, with food, demonstrations, merchandise.

While safety should be pursued for its own sake, the sad fact is that many Newton residents have given up riding a bicycle in the city because of safety concerns, and many parents will not allow their children to bike to school for the same reason. There are some dedicated bicyclists here, but all of them have many stories to tell about being "doored", ignored, and sometimes harassed as the price to pay for choosing to ride a bicycle on our city's streets. Many small and large cities throughout the world now recognize that improved bicycle safety is the key to encouraging more bicycling by people of all ages and levels of ability, and that it is part of the solution to some serious environmental and public health problems.

Major US cities actively encouraging bicycling, and integrating it into all their short-term and long-range planning, include Washington, Chicago, NYC, San Francisco. Now Boston, thanks to a mayoral initiative, is involved in a big push for more and safer bicycling. Leadership from the mayor's office is often the spark that gets things moving. "Bicycle Friendly" is a term that is no longer reserved for university towns and a few special places. The American League of Bicyclists has explicit criteria that define (and offer official designation as) a "Bicycle Friendly Community". Countless European cities, and cities all over the world, such as Kyoto, Cape Town, Bogota, and Sydney, have taken steps to make bicycling safe, convenient, and universal. Sometimes the change from bicycle-hostile to bicycle-friendly occurs remarkably rapidly, as happened recently when many thousands of rental bicycles were placed on the streets of Paris.

Newton is behind the eight ball. We are a geographically well-situated and affluent city, surrounded by other communities that have been making significant strides in improving bicycling facilities for their residents. We should be right up front, visibly working to reduce dependence on the automobile by encouraging bicycling as a healthy and energy-saving behavior. We have lost many of our traditional ways of being active and interactive. Almost anyone can ride a bicycle. Two and three wheeled bicycles have even been adapted for people with many types of disabilities. Anyone who has traveled abroad has seen the many ingenious ways bicycles can be designed to haul goods and equipment.

Bicycle safety can be improved dramatically with little or no public funds: paint, pruning sheers, strategic signage, removing obstructions to public pathways (like Newton's aqueducts), curb cuts, relocating traffic signals at crosswalks where these are now separated, etc. Grants and private funds are available for more ambitious projects.

We are a city increasingly choking on auto and truck traffic, especially at commuter hours. Small steps to get more people on bicycles will have the potential over time to significantly reduce congestion created by local vehicular traffic. This will conserve energy, make our city more sustainable and livable, while offering significant health and social benefits. There are also indirect benefits. Getting more people onto bicycles will increase public consciousness about the problem of the excessive amount of through traffic on our streets and build support for more public transit, so that people in neighboring communities will have better commuting options.