On this week’s episode of the “bigcitysmalltown” podcast, Jeff Moore, founding father of the SATX Social Trip and Mitchell Keogh, firefighter and avid bike owner who makes use of the Strava app to unite cyclers, converse with Robert Rivard concerning the state of biking in San Antonio— the great, unhealthy and ugly.
SATX Social Trip is a bunch of cyclists that hosts weekly downtown rides on Tuesday nights, a “rolling present,” together with households with children, canines in trailers, mountain bike riders, cruisers and folks of various abilities.
Rivard spoke concerning the metropolis’s “Decade of Downtown,” and the way plans didn’t bear in mind the wants of the biking group.
“We’ve develop into such a beautiful, city metropolis, in comparison with what we have been, however I don’t really feel like cyclists participated in that to the diploma that they need to have,” Rivard mentioned. “We didn’t create a community of full streets, we didn’t construct lots of [protected bike lanes].”
With a lot improvement taking place within the downtown core, extra density is coming to downtown, that means there will likely be extra vehicles on the street. In the meantime, the bike grasp plan will likely be adopted subsequent month by the town council.
The unhealthy facet, Moore mentioned, was that the biking group misplaced the L’Etape San Antonio occasion by the Tour de France, and the YMCA’s Siclovia occasion, which has occurred twice yearly, solely occurred as soon as this yr.
However many native teams fill in for these losses, together with the Javelina Bike Jam and Bike Fiesta. It’ll take the town prioritizing protected bike lanes to kind a community for individuals to get to locations throughout city, the visitors mentioned. Until that occurs, it’ll be arduous to see a rise in cyclists.
“Possibly … we are able to get extra individuals using on the streets, and extra individuals using, working errands and commuting, as a substitute of simply leisure using on the greenways,” Keogh mentioned.
Take heed to episode 86 of the bigcitysmalltown podcast under.
