Earthblog

As a part of their effort to provide community input into the effort to Plan Fort Collins for the next 5 – 50 years, the Fort Collins Bike Co-op recently held 9 public meetings in and around Fort Collins. The “listening sessions” or “Bike Town Meetings” were held to identify issues and opportunities for the future of bicycling in the city. The final report and list consists of 119 items that were gathered from citizens on how to improve bicycling in the community. The final report was adopted in its entirety by the Bicycle Advisory Committee and a recommendation to Council has been made that they begin implementation in the short and the long term. [Heather Manier]

Final Report: Bike Co-op Listening Sessions

Related to

Plan Fort Collins, May 1010

The Bike Co-op held its final listening session Wednesday, May 5^th. This meeting served to summarize citizens’ comments made during eight previous sessions held throughout the City and to prioritize action items for referral to City Planners, Transportation Planners and citizen’s boards and commissions.

There was unanimous consent to offer the following recommendation:

The community should take steps to improve bicycle safety and efficiency through a comprehensive bicycle safety education program and through enhanced engineering efforts. The education should target motorists, cyclist, K-12 children, and CSU students while the engineering enhancements should include:

The creation of bicycle boulevards ( like Vine, Swallow, Stover, Canyon, Stuart, etc.) for efficient long distance movement of bikes between and among “activity centers,” across town and between existing corridors, including the Mason Trail, the Powerline Trail, the Poudre Trail and the Spring Creek Trail;

Installation of additional signal actuation devices at stop lights, including the use of default modes to facilitate bicycle travel;

The use of sharrows (shared lane arrows) and improved “Share the Road” signs that include the secondary sign “Bikes use full lane.”

In honor of Transportation Month, we will be publishing our favorite local bike rides to inspire you to hop back on your bicycle and start pedaling.  If you need even more inspiration, check out the upcoming issue of Boneshaker: A Bicycling Almanac, available online and at bookstores and bike shops nationwide.

Bike Ride #2 by Jason Hardung

One of my favorite bike rides is through Rolland Moore Park at two or three in the morning.  I started taking this route a couple years ago when I was dating a girl over there, and I still love the ride today, but don't love her.  I enter through the North end, where it really isn't considered the park yet.  There is a dirt trail next to a creek.  Just a creek. I'm not good with names. It switches back and forth as trees hang above me motherly and eventually it forks into the main trail that circles the park.  At that time of darkness there are no other people around, just me, the stars, and the occasional deer.  I turn off my light and turn up my headphones and just go, go, go.  I become the music. The soft morning breeze pushes the tears from my eyes.  The ride gives me time to reflect. Or not reflect on anything. A couple times I've almost hit a cop car head on as it crept down the trail with it's spotlight in the bushes (the park closes at 11pm.), but I disappeared into the shadows before they could speak.  I am a jack rabbit on wheels. I am nothing. Sometimes a thick layer of fog hovers above the ground, sometimes there is a light drizzle.  I like being invisible.  I am the weather.  I come out on the other end.  The stoplights flash red.  Streetlights line the sidewalk. I reappear.

LOOK FOR THIS ARTICLE IN THE THE NEXT ISSUE (42-500) OF BONESHAKER: A BICYCLING ALMANAC.

According to Jacob Castillo and John McKinney, Fort Collins, Colorado, is the ground zero of environmental forward thinking. “We both graduated with MSBA degrees here in Fort Collins,” the duo said in the Bean Cycle Coffeeshop late last year—which is to say Masters of Business Administration degrees in Global Social Sustainably Enterprise from Colorado State University—“and in 2008 we began brainstorming about using bamboo as a material for bicycle frames. This city is ripe with environmentally minded people and organizations, so it’s a great place to do what we’re doing.”

The result of years of work, both on the business and bicycle fronts, is the newly incorporated Panda Bicycles, a small bicycle production company that instead of utilizing aluminum or steel or carbon fiber as main materials, uses sturdy bamboo stalk for frame tubing. “Bamboo,” McKinney said, “is damn-near perfect for bicycles in its size and strength.” They affectionately refer to their new shop, therefore, as “The Greenhouse,” since it’s where they “grow” bikes.

LOOK FOR THIS ARTICLE IN THE THE NEXT ISSUE (42-500) OF BONESHAKER: A BICYCLING ALMANAC.

Since the invention of the bicycle men have often attempted to discourage women from riding it or have commented on the ambiguity of the relationship between women’s body and the two-wheeled machine. The dominant and often unspoken reason for male discomfort with women’s cycling was/is men’s fear or concern that women would feel sexual arousal from a combination of their sitting position on a bicycle and the cycling motion. Another reason put forward in medical and popular journals was the concern that cycling would negatively interfere with women’s childbearing abilities. Despite the claim by several doctors that cycling could produce ill effects on female bodies, however, the medical profession eventually endorsed cycling on “the rationale that women’s role in achieving a superior race type could be enhanced by regular use of the bicycle” and by the claim by some doctors that cycling helped women cure hysteria (Sims 126).

A remarkable connection between women’s body and bicycling resulted at the end of the nineteenth century from the felicitous encounter of two technical developments. Color lithography, which enabled the creation of large colorful posters, came into being in the 1870s as the bicycle was undergoing important and definitive mechanical innovations. Both lithographers and bicycle manufacturers were eager to show off their new machines and thus organized innumerable exhibitions and shows that fostered interest and sales. Fierce competition among bicycle companies matched a similarly fierce competition among lithographers. The fusion of these two groups and innovations resulted in remarkable visual creations in colorful posters.