Category: Cycling

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Goodbye, BFCC

I’ve been on the Little Rock mayor’s Bike Friendly Community Committee for the past year.  The committee itself was formed several years ago to provide review of the city’s infrastructure and policies alongside a sort of list of ideal practices one would find in a city friendly to cyclists of all kinds.  Little Rock can’t become Portland overnight, but by choosing things that would be simple and low-cost, we could make real progress toward treating cyclists and pedestrians well and providing safe space for all road users.  Sounds good, right?

It was useful and worthwhile work, I’d thought.  I was aware that there were problems – that the specific structure of LR’s city government made progress of this kind difficult, and that there were people on the committee itself who were happy with the status quo, who would be difficult for me to work with.  I knew it would be time consuming, and that I’d have to go to a lot of meetings.  (I hate meetings.) Continue reading “Goodbye, BFCC”

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Bon Ton Roulet

A couple of months ago, we gave Mandy a present:  A plain white envelope.  Inside was the receipt for her ‘ticket’ to participate in the Bon Ton Roulet, a seven-day supported bike tour around the Finger Lakes in upstate New York.  It’s her first trip in that direction, and more importantly, it’s her first trip out of state without parents.

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We dropped her off at the train station for a late-evening departure on Thursday.  She was to travel with our friend Kathy, as well as with a couple of other women cyclists from the Little Rock area.  We sat with them for a bit but left before the midnight train arrived.  Mandy had really been looking forward to even this part of the trip – she was by far the youngest in the group, but as the only one who had traveled on Amtrak, she was ready to provide a tour of the facilities!  They sent texts from the train:  they’d arrived in St. Louis a bit late, they’d left the train in Chicago, they’d used my notes to find stuff to do during their layover, they’d boarded their new train for Syracuse. Continue reading “Bon Ton Roulet”

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Training Rides, New Bike

Mandy and Kathy have spent the last couple of weeks getting ready for their trip to New York.  Neither has been riding a lot, so now that Mandy’s back from her trip to Tulsa, they’ve been getting together nearly every day to spend some time on the bikes.

It was a good idea, except that on Thursday, on the way home from their practice ride, Kathy’s little grey Mini got rear ended on the interstate.  The liftgate is crumpled, the bike rack is ruined, and – the worst news – both bikes are twisted up.  Both front wheels look like flattish Pringles.  Mandy’s frame is only bent a little, but because of it the bike won’t shift properly. Kathy’s carbon fiber is dinged enough that two or three bike shop people have said it would be unsafe to ride. Continue reading “Training Rides, New Bike”

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National Bike Week – Rocktown Trackdown

Since last summer, Bryan and I had been thinking that a bike/walk scavenger hunt in Little Rock would be fun.  Vinny’s alleycats are great fun for a handful of people, but what if somebody did a race that was a little less competitive and a little easier to navigate?  If participants were given a map, it’d be easier to plan a route.  If people just had to answer questions, we wouldn’t need many volunteers. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Rocktown Trackdown”

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National Bike Week – Bike to Work Day

Sometime in February, a coworker from upstairs said that she’d like to do Bike to Work Day as an ’employee wellness program.’  She’s the one who does Walk Across Arkansas, and a number of other wellness things – she’s a gerontologist – and she thought we should do Bike to Work again.

In the past, Extension has done Bike to Work Day as part of the 4H program, with really limited success.  LaVona and I decided that we’d do better.  Against my better judgment, we formed a Committee.  I hate committees.  But this one was pretty good, because we picked people we liked, and every month we’d ride across town to eat lunch someplace and talk about what we were going to do about Bike to Work Day. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Bike to Work Day”

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National Bike Week – Cyclofemme Womens’ Ride

One thing I brought back from the National Bike Summit this spring has to do with women in cycling.  Only 25% of cyclists in the US are women.  Why is that?  Because, as a group, we really do need different things than men in order to be comfortable riding bikes.  Women like to ride as a social thing, I learned.  Women like to feel clean and safe.  Women like to feel accepted when they ride.  And if women can be encouraged to ride more, more kids will grow up on bikes.  It’s worth working on.  I hadn’t realized it before. Continue reading “National Bike Week – Cyclofemme Womens’ Ride”

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Falling Water Gravel Tour

Mandy’s shaping up to be a singlespeed rigid mountain bike girl.  She wears plaid and she smells bad and she says she has three speeds:  pedal, pedal harder, and walk.

We spent some miles last weekend on gravel roads up near Sand Gap.  Jarion decided to play SAG wagon / fisherman, which meant we could ride light and put our gear in his Jeepett.  It was a great weekend of grinding up gravel hills, flying down them, wading in the creek, eating steaks in the rain, and playing cards in the middle of gravel roads. Continue reading “Falling Water Gravel Tour”

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The Rebel Alliance

BACA, our local bike advocacy group, has been pretty stagnant for awhile.  Membership’s sort of gone flat (click here to sign up).  Lots of clubs and groups don’t feel represented.  Lots of minor events are sponsored, without much effect.  Meetings felt useless to most cyclists, and people stopped coming.  The most recent board tended to get into shouting matches at their meetings.

Major local issues went unnoticed, or worse, BACA board members said the wrong thing in public and other cyclists and groups spoke up to disagree.  The city and county government stopped listening because they didn’t know who to listen to.  BACA could have an enormous impact, but it doesn’t.

Or it didn’t.  Some of us got together to talk about it.  It turned out that a lot of cycling families and groups felt the same way we did.  We extended some olive branches to teams that have been feeling like outsiders.  The sort of vague, leaderless group ended up hatching  a group volunteers excited about serving on the board to make it a wider, louder, more active advocacy organization.

I managed to get a spot on the nominating committee, and four days after that committee was established, we had a full slate of officers to nominate – mountain bikers, road racers, blog writers, trail builders.  The April BACA meeting saw that group voted in, amid angry confusion and loudish cheering. It makes me smile to watch people do what they care about, and I’m looking forward to this year.  I’m looking forward to having an advocacy group here in LR.  I think they’ll accomplish great things, starting right about now.

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The Tall Bike Project

Our friend Mitch got a welder for Christmas, and ever since then, we’ve been thinking about that welder.  He doesn’t know how to weld but he’s got a book.  Bryan doesn’t know how to weld but he’s been around his dad who can weld.  I don’t know how to weld, which makes no sense because all the guys in my family can, but they never taught me, which I’ve always been slightly offended about.

We’ve all been thinking about tall bikes for awhile.  And we have this lovely welder.  Welding can’t be that hard, right?  You just wear a funny hat, put pieces of metal near each other, and poke them with that stick thing.  Continue reading “The Tall Bike Project”