Cycling

It’s Bike Week in Rochester! In fact, Bike Week is so full of great events that it’s swollen to more than a week, running 10-19 May, 2019. So whether you’re a seasoned cyclist or a curious new rider, you can get involved in lots of events to kick off the summer cycling season and explore Rochester on two wheels. All of these events are on the RCA Calendar, which includes more details (click the + at bottom right to get them on your calendar, too). Get a load of them:

• The Light up the Night Ride, with glow sticks and prizes, starts 10 May at 7:30 pm at 131 Elmwood Ave.
• The George Eastman Bike Tour, rolling through Rochester history, starts 11 May at 10 am at George’s place (900 East Ave).
• The Twilight Criterium will race through the streets of downtown Rochester at breakneck speed on the evening of 11 May.
• Kidical Mass will take a family ride for Mothers’ Day on 12 May at 10 am.
• The Flower City Bike Party Ride will cruise through the southeast neighborhoods on 13 May, starting at 6:30 pm at 275 East Main St.
• The City of Rochester will start its Tuesday Guided Bike Tours on 14 May at 6 pm at the Lake Riley Lodge in Cobbs Hill Park.
• Rochester Bike Kids will stage their first Taco Tuesday Ride of 2019 on 14 May at 7 pm at 489 South Ave.
• The Ride of Silence will have cyclists riding in solidarity for safer streets with better bike infrastructure on 15 May, starting at 7 pm at 275 East Main St.
• The first of this summer’s Unity Rides will begin at 7 pm on 16 May at 855 West Main St.
• It’s national Bike to Work Day on 17 May, and RCA will be offering free coffee and snacks through the morning at Union and Broad Sts.
• The Beechwood Ride will tour that neighborhood on 17 May, starting at 5:30 at 530 Webster Ave.
• Meanwhile, the Tryon Bike Week Social Ride will start at 6 pm at 80 Rockwood Place.
• Get the grime off your ride at a free bike wash, 18 May 10 am to 3 pm at 713 Monroe Ave.
• The Reconnect Rochester Beechwood Complete Streets Makeover will turn a dangerous intersection into a welcoming place for bikes, pedestrians, and drivers; help make the makeover happen 10 am to 2 pm on 18 May at 441 Parsells Ave.
• Last but not least, the Seersucker Ride will take us out in style on 19 May, starting at 10 am at 571 South Ave.

Check out the RCA Calendar for links, contact information, descriptions, and more!

It’s April in Rochester, so our Pace bikeshare program has returned from hibernation, and bikes are back on the streets. In fact, I took my first bikeshare ride of the season yesterday, and it got me from a lunch meeting at U of R to an afternoon meeting in the East End for just $1, in less than 15 minutes, on a warm and lovely day, when I didn’t have my own bike with me.
As maybe you realize, $1 per ride isn’t enough to support the bikeshare program. Each of the dozens of Pace docks in Rochester exists because city government, businesses, community organizations, and citizens have come together to provide $9000 per year. Some docks bring customers and are enthusiastically supported by businesses whose earnings increase much more than the cost of the dock. But to really grow active transportation in Rochester, we need the bikeshare network to cover lots of places people go, and to extend to under-served populations for whom low-cost bike transportation is not just a novelty, but a true economic opportunity.
That’s why I urge you to help keep bike share on Hudson Avenue by making a donation for the dock there. Our friends at Reconnect Rochester fund the dock with a yearly campaign. You can read their well-stated explanation (and also find out about the perks of becoming a supporter). Donate here. I did!

According to the Democrat and Chronicle, the Canal Trail will be closed near I-390 in Gates from 22 April until Memorial Day or later. Cyclists are advised to find an alternate route. You can read more here.

The City of Rochester is planning work on two sections of Main St.: from St. Paul St. to State St., and from Goodman St. to Culver Rd. Cycle tracks (bike lanes separated from motor traffic by a curb) are included in one of the design options for each section. The Rochester Cycling Alliance supports cycle tracks for these projects! Cycle tracks promote the highest level of safety for pedestrians, bicyclists, and motor vehicles including buses.
We hope you will take just a minute, right now, to send letters expressing your support of cycle tracks. We’ve written this draft letter about St. Paul to State, and this draft letter about Goodman to Culver, which you can use as templates to get started. Be sure to insert your own name and address where appropriate, and send both letters to the Hon. Norman Jones, the City’s Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Services, who is overseeing the design process. You could also send copies to Mayor Lovely A. Warren, Deputy Mayor James P. Smith, Councilman Malik Evans, and Project Manager Jeff Mroczek. Happy letter writing! Happy citizenship!

We posted a few weeks ago about great new data from the Genesee Transportation Council showing just how much the Riverway Trail gets used–a lot! Now we can share preliminary data, also from GTC, about usage of the Erie Canal Path. During the week of 1 September, more than 4000 people used the Canal Path at the NY-15A bridge. Add that to the Riverway Trail numbers, and you find more than 10,000 users of these great community resources. Let’s make sure they are supported and expanded!
For all you wonks, here’s the data:
Sat, Sep 1, 2018: 800
Sun, Sep 2, 2018: 603
Mon, Sep 3, 2018: 683
Tue, Sep 4, 2018: 519
Wed, Sep 5, 2018: 400
Thu, Sep 6, 2018: 478
Fri, Sep 7, 2018: 653

An update from Karen Lankeshofer, longtime Cycling Alliance member and Henrietta resident who is teaching in Kazan, Russia:
In July 2017, I got an email from a former ESL student of mine asking me if I wanted to teach English at her friend’s private school in Kazan, Russia. I jumped at the chance and was here within 7 weeks. If any of you are soccer fans, you will know that Kazan hosted many of the World Cup matches during last summer. The city lies about 500 miles east of Moscow and is the capital of the Republic of Tatarstan, a state in the Russian Federation.
The population is about half Tatar and half ethnic Russian. Signs are written in the Tatar and Russian languages, sometimes also in English. The city is dotted with mosques and orthodox churches and without a doubt is the most tolerant city I have ever experienced.
Tatarstan is a very wealthy area with oil and chemical production. Being so far from Europe, it has been mainly influenced by Persia, Mongolia, China, and other eastern parts of the world throughout its history. Genghis Khan controlled the area for many years.
With its considerable wealth, Tatarstan realizes it needs to have more people who are proficient in English to function better in European marketplaces. That’s why my school has me teaching a group of 3- and 4-year-olds English. It is a total immersion program; my aides and I only speak English with these children. It was difficult at the beginning last September because the kids knew no English and were used to getting their own way. Parents were also skeptical until they started seeing results about this time last year. Now they are true believers. The older kids use full sentences which are sometimes grammatically incorrect, but still perfectly understandable. Even the younger ones understand everything and repeat individual words or phrases. It’s been a rewarding one and a half years in the classroom, but it’s also strenuous.
My first purchase in Kazan was a folding bike, which I take on the subway when I’m headed downtown and use to get all over the city, except in winter. The weather is extreme here and, even if I could ride through the deep snow, I don’t relish slipping on the ever-present ice and breaking a leg.
Last February I attended the Winter Cycling Conference in Moscow and met some officials from Kazan who are really motivated to improve the cycling scene here in the city. I thought, “If they can do something, so can I!”, and convinced my school to let me start a bike club.
It’s been a huge success. The mountain biking champion of Russia gives bike lesson to the littlest kids on small bikes without pedals, and I give lessons to the first graders, mostly talking about safety but also taking excursions on trails in the woods. We involve all the kids and have had a family riding day; plus, the head of the Rotary Club here, who just completed a bike trip around the world, has come to talk to our kids. He and I are now working together to spread my school’s program to other schools. And the parents are ecstatic that their kids are leaving their bikes at school all fall to ride on the track we painted on the school courtyard. One parent told us his kid’s bike usually sits in the cellar all summer.
All in all, this has been a great experience for me. I have friends from around the world with whom I undertake a lot of different adventures here in Russia, and I see that they bike revolution is truly an international phenomenon.
I’ll be home in August to start patching inner tubes again. Keep up all your good work and I’ll see you then.
Karen L.

Here’s exciting news for those of us who promote bikes and alternative transportation: more than 1000 people, including many community leaders, rode in Bike to School Day events at ten different Rochester-area schools on 9 May. Those events were among thousands nationwide, all held on the same day to promote biking and walking as great ways to get to school.
Biking to school has lots of benefits. At a time when childhood obesity continues to grow as one of our country’s greatest health risks, getting kids biking regularly can keep them in better physical health and form habits for a lifetime of good health. Biking is great for emotional and mental health, too. Biking builds community by allowing neighbors to get to know each other and see the impact schools have on neighborhoods. Biking is brilliant for sustainability because it burns no fossil fuels and emits no carbon dioxide. And of course, biking is fun–one student rider in Brighton said, “Biking to school is so much better than riding the bus!”
Bike to School Day rides took place all over the Rochester area this year. In the city of Rochester, School #23 drew 55 riders, and School #58 drew 50. In Honeoye Falls, Manor Intermediate School had 70 riders. In Pittsford, Calkins Road Middle School had 25 riders, Park Road Elementary School had 40, and Jefferson Road Elementary School had 150. In Brighton, Council Rock Primary School encouraged students to ride all week, French Road Elementary School had 240 riders on 9 May, and Twelve Corners Middle School had over 300. Finally, Indian Landing Elementary School in Penfield had nearly 300 riders.
Community leaders came out to support Bike to School Day in a big way. Superintendent Barbara Deane-Williams of the Rochester City School District rode in the event at School #23 and invited her entire cabinet to ride along. Many did, including Carlos Cotto, RCSD Director of Physical Education. RCSD School Board President Van White joined the School #23 ride as well. Penfield Town Supervisor Tony LaFountain and Brighton Town Supervisor William Moehle both greeted students at the event at Indian Landing, along with Penfield School Board President Catherine Dean and School Board Member John Piper. Principals and teachers rode along at many of the events, too. We are grateful to our leaders for taking the time to support kids biking and walking to school!
More thanks go to the area police departments who accompanied riders to ensure traffic safety; to businesses and organizations that donated snacks or prizes, including Park Avenue Bikes, Wegmans, and Common Ground Health; to Zagster for providing Pace bikes, and to school staff who supported the events.
Over 1000 people rode last Wednesday and had a great time. Let’s capture the momentum to get more kids biking and walking to school in the Rochester area! Think about organizing a Bike to School Day event at your own school sometime soon. Organizing requires surprisingly little work, and those of us who’ve done it before would happily serve as resources, so send us an email. Help your own kids bike to school everyday. If the ride seems too much for them to handle alone, talk to neighbors about organizing a bike train: a group of five or ten kids can ride safely together with a couple of grownups to guide them. Ask teachers and school leaders to include bikes in the physical education curriculum if they aren’t already included. You can contact the New York Bicycling Coalition for a ready-made curriculum. And consider doing more of your own daily travel by walking or biking. One teacher in Honeoye Falls said, “I’ve started biking to school myself because I’ve seen your kids doing it.” There’s a great example to follow.

The ROC the Riverway Program, jointly supported by the City of Rochester and the State of New York, will soon bring major changes to Rochester’s riverfront. The Rochester Cycling Alliance is cheering loud for our community leaders, who made the right choice when they wrote the Project’s first design principle: “Focus on design that is oriented to pedestrians, bicyclists, boaters, and recreational enthusiasts”.
That said, the details of the Project haven’t been decided yet, and for cyclists and pedestrians, some of the draft ideas are better than others. We at the RCA urge community members to give feedback as planning continues. Here are some important points to think about:

• The cycling community should oppose the Aqueduct Reimagined (“AR”) project, for the following reasons:
  1. The new protected bike lanes across Broad Street would be destroyed. The plan calls for no bike lanes on the pedestrian plaza that would replace it, and the current design has no bike or ADA accessible access to the east part of Broad Street. The City has consistently opposed protected bike lanes on Main, and no plans for protected bike lanes are active for Court Street, therefore our only safe east-west corridor is demolished.
  2. Current AR plans call for north-south pedestrian/cycling paths along the river, but there is no method for north-south bike traffic to avoid massive conflicts with east-west pedestrian flow in the plans.
  3. The AR project takes up a majority of the State money allocated for all the projects ($35M out of $50M), starving other projects that better promote cycling transportation and urban living.

The following are projects we feel should be considered top priorities based on both their importance to cycling as transportation, and to increase the number of downtown residents who would likely use active transportation. We recommend advocating for them to be included in “Phase 1” of the project:

1. Recharging the Trail ($5M): The current River Trail is in appalling shape as regards to pavement quality, and badly needs repair. In addition, it is too narrow to adequately serve both pedestrians and cyclists (especially pedestrians with dogs on leashes). Improved River Trails will bring additional people downtown from the southern neighborhoods and U of R without adding to parking and traffic problems.
2. Riverside Development and Arena on the River (~$8M): This is great location for mixed use commercial/residential development, with nice views of the cataracts and easy access to events at the arena. Residents of this development would be very likely to use active transportation, and the entrance to the River Trail here would be improved.
3. Riverfront Reborn ($10M): (same as above, but with easy access to High Falls area as well)
4. Welcome Connection ($40M): A better connection to the High Falls and MCC area from Downtown through State Street, which is currently very repellent to both pedestrians and cyclists.
5. Preserving Pont de Rennes ($9M): Preserves an essential connection between east and west sides and the entertainment/pedestrian flow between MCC, High Falls and the Genesee Brewery.
6. Running Track Bridge ($5M): Completes the El Camino Trail and allows residents from the northeast neighborhoods easy and safe access to the High Falls area. (Note: While this project would allow access from northeast neighborhoods, and the existing River Trails give access from the southern neighborhoods, there are currently no proposed projects that provide safe access from the northwest neighborhoods. There is an equity issue here.)

In addition, we believe that the Mill Street Connection and Bridge the Loop projects, which together total $19M, should be replaced by a project to infill the northern part of the Inner Loop, which has long been planned anyways, would cost the same or less money, would provide better connections between High Falls and Downtown, with has the added advantage of creating additional taxable land.

Please send your feedback right here.

It’s that time of year again: kick off the summer cycling season with Bike Week 2018 in Rochester. The week (plus bonus days) spanning May 11-20 is jam-packed with bike events, and it’s a great time to get involved. You can find out about biking at the Public Market or at the Red Wings game, learn bike repair skills or just borrow a stand and some tools, watch professional racers at the Twilight Criterium, ride to honor injured cyclists, ride for racial reconciliation, ride to Rochester’s abolitionist and suffragette landmarks, ride with kids, ride with churches, ride in seersucker, or ride after tacos. All these events and more are on the RCA calendar, and you can subscribe so they will appear on your calendar, too. Come out and ride!

What’s revolutionary about Copenhagen is how absolutely normal it all seems. In this, the world’s most bike-friendly city, bikes are just not a big deal, because bikes are everywhere. Copenhageners take it for granted that every street has a cycle track, up the curb from cars and separated from sidewalks. Copenhageners think nothing of seeing a street carrying more bikes than cars, because it’s almost impossible to find any street that isn’t. None of the two million residents of the Danish capital notice that school buses are totally absent, because kids pedal to school, or ride in a parent’s cargo bike, and always have. Bikes in Copenhagen aren’t flashy or fast, don’t have shocks or carbon fiber frames, don’t even pretend to be sports equipment. They are simply transportation, with fenders and racks and baskets, and their dominance in this city makes it wonderfully vibrant, alive, and real.
Those of us who want our own cities to become wonderful in similar ways have to ask: What makes Copenhagen work so well? For sure, there is critical mass, a culture in which everybody bikes by default, and to do anything else puts you outside the norm. But that cultural psychology isn’t accidental, and is empowered by choices, initiatives, and above all, infrastructure. On a recent business trip, I had the happy opportunity to see it in person, and can share some observations.
For starters, in Copenhagen, you can bike with confidence that nearly every street will have a dedicated cycle track separating cyclists from both motorists and pedestrians, like this one in front of the stock exchange. Traffic signals for bikes (a la Montreal) keep things flowing smoothly. Danish cyclists follow the signals and follow the rules, not only because Denmark has a culture of orderly conformity, but also because the infrastructure makes it easy. In Copenhagen, crossing a bridge on your bike isn’t harrowing or dangerous; in fact, you’ll find more bridges for bikes than for cars. The new Inderhavnsbroen Sliding Bridge gives cyclists and pedestrians a harbor crossing that’s unavailable to motorists. The Bryggebroen gives another, and upon reaching the west side of the harbor, cyclists ride a graceful sky bridge that swoops above the public swimming pool and connects them directly to a large shopping center, without interfering with either pedestrians or cars.
The main entrance to the shopping center, of course, is flanked by a parking garage–for bikes! In Copenhagen, you can also be confident that there will be sensible and convenient bike parking. My wife and I visited the shopping center on a day with temperatures near freezing and steady snowfall, which is unusually harsh weather for that coastal city, but the garage was full anyway. At stately Rosenborg Castle, where the Danish royalty lived for centuries, the bike racks are tastefully tucked behind hedgerows–but certainly there are racks. Bike parking seems to go forever at the Norreport metro station, and at the main train station, the bikes are stacked double-decker (just like in Trondheim).
My favorite place to park a bike in Copenhagen is Maersk Tower, not only because the tower enjoys a fantastic view of the city, but because it features an underground bike parking garage with a door that opens automatically when you pedal up to it. Wow. The tower is a new addition to the University of Copenhagen, and has no equivalent garage for cars. I’m told that when the Dean responsible for its construction was questioned about the design, she replied that she’s in her sixties, and bikes an hour each way to work everyday, and that everybody else can bike, too!
I haven’t even written about the food in Copenhagen, which is fantastic. Nor have I written about the parks, which are everywhere, or the museums or the attractions. That would be another article. But taken as a whole, Copenhagen is not just a clutter of tall buildings that happen to stand on the same patch of earth, but rather a coherent and interwoven city, a place where humans live that functions on human scales, and bikes are a key factor to its successes. Let’s learn all we can from it, and improve our own cities’ quality of life accordingly.

Cycling Alliance President Scott MacRae joined Brighton Town Board member Robin Wilt and Heather O’Donnell of the Rochester People’s Climate Coalition to talk about road diets on Connections with Evan Dawson. A road diet means narrowing or eliminating lanes from roads with excess car capacity–leaving more room for bikes, pedestrians, and human-scale transportation. A section of East Avenue in Brighton and Pittsford is scheduled for a road diet this year and will be reconfigured to have one travel lane in each direction along with a central turn lane, instead of two travel lanes in each direction. The question is whether bike lanes get installed as well. The Cycling Alliance enthusiastically supports designing all three travel lanes to be narrow enough to leave the legally-required five feet for a bike lane on each side of the road. Slower cars and more bike lanes make for a safer, healthier, and more sustainable community! You can hear the conversation, read more about the East Avenue road diet and sign a petition supporting bike lanes on that section of East Avenue.

by Karen Lankeshofer

It’s my good fortune to be teaching in Kazan, Russia this year because it afforded me the opportunity to attend the Winter Cycling Congress in Moscow. The 4-day conference was held from Thursday, February 7 until Sunday, February 11. It wasn’t just about cycling when it snows, it was about making cities more livable. (Copenhagen removes snow from the sidewalks and bike paths first and only then cleans the streets. The snow is then dumped in parking lots. Motorists understand that they are not the top priority. Ya gotta love it!)
From all the sessions I attended, one thing was abundantly clear: change starts at the bottom and it always starts small. Whether it was passing out LED lights to school kids in Finland so they could ride to school through the dark or the Austrian-Polish couple who rides their tandem all over Europe and invites mayors of the cities they stop in to take a ride with them, all the initiatives were from the bottom up and not top down. These stories underscored for me the continued importance of grassroots efforts and constant advocacy work. To see how advocacy can work well, check out Slow Roll Chicago and Equiticity. Obai Reed is making things work.
Two other important take-aways for me were that poorly constructed or insufficient infrastructure is the cause of many otherwise avoidable crashes. Markings have to be clear for all traffic participants, surfaces have to be non-slippery and all infrastructure should be built with the assumption that it will be used in winter and constructed accordingly. The second thing is that Vision Zero in Sweden is now 20 years old. The goal of the program is being revised to not just reducing traffic deaths and injuries, but to increasing life expectancy.
One unexpected bonus for me was that I met the delegation from my Russian province of Tatarstan there. They are very interested in improving biking conditions through bike education in the schools and creating better infrastructure. I was able to connect them with my school, and my administration is already making plans to install a covered bike rack in spring and working together with the delegation to hold bike education classes at Bala-City School.
The WCC closed on Sunday with a bike parade through snowy Moscow. There were between 3000 and 4000 participants. Winter cycling is not a passing fad. It’s a part of a growing awareness that urban areas have to change their way of thinking if they want to survive and remain viable.
Next year’s WCC will take place in Calgary.

I might have expected Trondheim, Norway to have lousy bike infrastructure. After all, its latitude is just shy of the Arctic Circle, it’s a city of only middling size, and Norway is a petro-state with a trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund earned almost entirely from oil. But I would have been dead wrong.
I had the privilege of visiting Trondheim on a recent business trip and was glad to find a thriving, lovely haven for bikes as transportation. Anecdotally, there seemed to be more bikes on the roads than cars. The cycle path in front of my hotel headed straight to city center and was constantly busy. Across the street was a double-decker covered bike rack serving the residents of an adjacent apartment building. Strolling around the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, I found every entrance to every building surrounded by tremendous bike racks — and the racks were overflowing. Students pedaled. Businessmen pedaled. Grandmothers pedaled. Researchers attending the conference with me told stories about how much faster it is to get anywhere in Trondheim by biking than by driving, even despite the city’s steep hills.
For that matter, most of the people who weren’t biking seemed to be using public transportation. Trondheim has no subway, but the buses come constantly. Even buses to the airport, nearly an hour away, run once every eight minutes, with multiple stops in the city.
How does Trondheim do it? First, they have great infrastructure. I saw plenty of cycle paths, offering cyclists a place to ride that keeps cars on the other side of a curb. Where there weren’t cycle paths, there were bike lanes. Wide bike/pedestrian routes along the river and along the fjord offer quick, quiet, picturesque connections between city center and outlying neighborhoods. That said, by US standards, few neighborhoods are really “outlying”, which is Trondheim’s second secret. Though there are fewer than 200,000 residents, the population density feels to me like it’s similar to Boston or DC. Almost nowhere is too far to bike. Third, bike infrastructure is clearly planned and carefully maintained. Signs mark the way, a bike lift (sykkelheis in Norwegian) helps cyclists up the hills, and automated counters gather vital statistics about how many people travel by biking or walking. Finally, alternative transportation is incentivized. Gasoline sells for about three times as much in Norway as in the US (though the price is actually cheap by European standards). Moreover, according to one of the conference hosts, the Norwegian government taxes car purchases at roughly 200%, making bikes and buses into financial no-brainers. In many ways, Trondheim, Norway has chosen to build a society in which human-scale, human-powered transportation is comfortable, economical, and normal. That’s what really explains all the biking vikings.
I’ll take one minor point of exception to biking in Trondheim: the city’s bike share program is nowhere near as convenient or effective as Zagster right here in Rochester. City bikes in Trondheim cost about $10/day for tourists and require that the day start and end at the tourism office downtown, from which user cards are obtained. Zagster in Rochester costs just $1 per half-hour ride, with rides starting and any Zagster rack and ending at any Zagster rack. For an extra $1, you can even end your ride in Rochester anyplace within the city limits — it’s wonderfully convenient. (To learn more, see my earlier article about Zagster.)
Inconvenient city bikes notwithstanding, the main point is clear: Trondheim gives a tangible and unarguable example of a mid-sized, snowy city where human-scale transportation is the norm. Biking and walking and riding buses there are the easiest, most enjoyable ways to get almost anywhere in town, and nearly everybody uses them. The result is a healthier, more human, more sustainable city. Let’s keep working to bring the same quality of life to Rochester.