By: Shannon Dunn

Penny Troutner has an uncommon lament: “My son Marshall turned sixteen last September and we’re trying to get him to get his license. But he says he doesn’t need it because he doesn’t see any point. There’s no place he needs to go that he can’t go on his bike.”

Of course, the teen’s perception of Baltimore is colored by growing up with a mother who’s an avid cyclist, an owner of a bike shop, and the first chair of the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Committee in 1998. But, if things go as planned, her son’s experience may some day prove typical.

In May 2006, the Baltimore City Planning Commission unanimously adopted its Bicycle Master Plan, an aggressive program of improvements that will create a network of striped bike lanes, clearly marked signs, links to existing public transportation, and increased bicycle safety education. Road repair began last summer, and the City is continuing its work this summer on Phase 1, the College Town Network—connecting Johns Hopkins, Loyola, College of Notre Dame, and Morgan State—which will be fully functional by the fall 2007 semester.

Today, with close to $2.5 million in funds in place and the April 2007 hiring of Eva Khoury as the city’s first Pedestrian and Bicycle Coordinator, the ambitious plan is designed to make Baltimore as bike-friendly as Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., by 2012.

“A lot of specifics still need to be hammered out,” says Troutner, “but we’re still feeling very positive about the future.”
 
Greg Hinchliffe, who replaced Troutner as the chair of the Mayor’s Bicycle Advisory Committee in 2004, notes that the neighborhoods of Baltimore—many of them comprised of tidy grids of one-way side streets with relatively low traffic volume—make the city a fine place to ride already without much improvement. “Unfortunately, neighborhoods are often separated by hideous barriers, most of them man-made,” he says, referring to the highways and other arterials designed to maximize the volume and speed of cars that chop up the city’s neighborhoods. That can make moving from one part of town to the next on a bike very difficult, Hinchliffe says.

Currently, there are 4.7 miles of on-street bike lanes and 13.8 miles of off-street bike paths (shared-use trails) in the city, but the new plan bumps those numbers up considerably, creating a 450-mile system of bike lanes and off-street paths that are designed to connect all of Baltimore’s neighborhoods to re-creational and employment opportunities within the city.

Ultimately, Baltimore’s bike path will link to the East Coast Greenway, a city-to-city trail system that, when complete, will connect 3,000 miles of paved paths from Maine to the Florida Keys for cyclists and hikers by 2010.

But physical improvements to the roads are only part of the solution. Aside from the obvious problems posed by potholes, uneven pavement,  and bike tires that get stuck in sewer grates running parallel to the curb, there is an even greater danger: cars.

Michael McShane, a philosophy professor at Loyola College who rides his bike to work, complains that cyclists are regularly forced out into the moving traffic. “You have to ride far enough out in the lane so that people can’t door you,” he says, explaining that getting “doored” (colliding with an opening car door while on a bike), and being harassed by disgruntled drivers are common experiences for cyclists here. “People in cars will drive right up behind you and honk. Or they yell things. ‘Get off the road!’ is a big one. There’s a lot of nasty aggression out there. When you’re on a bike, you are vulnerable—cars are big machines.”

Indeed, the local injury statistics for pedestrians and cyclists are frightening: According to the Maryland Highway Safety Office a pedestrian is injured by a car once every four hours in the Baltimore region; a third of those injured are under 16; more than a dozen bicyclists are injured in the Baltimore region each week; bicycle and pedestrian deaths, injuries, and property damage cost the state an estimated $850 million a year. With this as a backdrop, the new plan is full of safety strategies geared toward making it safer for cyclists to take to the road.

If the plan can make cycling safer, the hope is Baltimoreans will abandon their cars and take to their bikes—instead of leaving this the exclusive bailiwick of serious adult cyclists.

In McShane’s case, he is both a serious cyclist and an enthusiastic advocate of broadening the practice. Growing up one of seven children in Lincoln, Nebraska, McShane learned the value of a bike early on: “We literally couldn’t all ride in the same car,” he says. And with no expectation of receiving a car for his sixteenth birthday, McShane got around on his bike. He went on to ride his bike all through graduate school in Philadelphia, then in Italy, and now in Baltimore. “I feel great when I get to work. I love that I get there on my own power.”

For McShane, who also owns a car, this is an empowering choice. Not all city residents have that luxury. “Almost half of Baltimore residents don’t have access to a car,” says One Less Car’s Executive Director Richard Chambers, insisting we have an obligation to consider their needs as well. One Less Car, a local nonprofit, has been in the thick of bike advocacy for years and was instrumental in lobbying for the passage of the state’s 2001 Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Bill.


Meanwhile, beyond formal government initiatives, there have been some grassroots efforts to make Baltimore a bike-friendly town—from all different quarters.

For example, the Velocipede Bike Project aims to get “affordable bikes into the hands of people of modest means” via a bike co-op that uses donated, second-hand, and landfill-bound bikes to teach bike repair and maintenance. Membership is open to anyone who wants to learn, in exchange for a monthly fee of $33 or three hours of labor at the workshop. In addition to the services the Lanvale Street co-op offers, fully inspected and refurbished bikes are available for sale from $5 to $200 (there’s typically a two-week wait). Founded in 2005 by Beth Wacks, who is the only full-time salaried employee, Velocipede is quite literally putting the necessary biking tools into the hands of the community. She is one of the eight 2006 Open Society Institute fellows working in Baltimore under an 18-month grant designed to help good, creative community-building projects see the light of day in underserved communities. “As the city becomes more gentrified, traffic is only going to get worse,” Wacks says, seeing her project as marching lockstep with what she hopes will be good city planning. “We need to get the people who are building roads to take bikes into consideration from the beginning.”

Other community activists tackle the issue from a different angle. Greg Cantori, executive director of the Marion I. & Henry J. Knott Foundation and board member of One Less Car, hopes to introduce Baltimore to a concept called Ciclovia, after a weekly event in Bogotá, Colombia. For more than twenty years, the city of Bogotá has closed streets to cars every Sunday. Literally translated from the Spanish meaning “bike path,” the weekly festival-style event Cantori plans for Baltimore would modify car usage along mapped routes one day a week. Roads would be shared by pedestrians, cyclists, inline skaters, and strollers —basically anything moving slower than 5 miles per hour, including cars. (Of course, special considerations are taken for emergency vehicles and buses.) Everyone would have access to their residence or place of business during the event, and all intersections would remain open and operate normally. Cities like Ottawa and Paris have done this, and this May, El Paso, Texas, held its first Ciclovia.

Cantori is quick to explain that the expanded and alternative use of the city streets would raise awareness about the environmental impact of all kinds of transportation, not just bikes: “I see Ciclovia creating the groundswell of supportive advocates who will demand much better walking and biking and transit accommodations—let’s not forget our wheelchair users—in everything our region does.”
   
Aside from his utopian aspirations for the event, Cantori sees an event like Ciclovia as giving a lift to the local economy.  Increased pedestrian traffic could bring a renewed prosperity to downtown areas that are all but shut down on the weekends. By having people out of their cars and actually on the streets, Cantori predicts that the weekly event would stimulate consumer spending in a new way: “Ciclovia will make attendance at a Ravens game look small in benefits to the retailer.”

—Shannon Dunn, a graduate of the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, is the author of several books for children.

Leave a Comment Here



EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT