ChiWhoBike #9
I think people who don’t bike think you have to be physically active to bike, or like work out a lot to bike, which just really isn’t the case. You can bike at your own pace, you can get more used to it over time. I think that even people who have never ridden a bike can easily take up biking if they wanted to.
I’ve been biking since I was 12 or 13, just in middle school and high school, and then I took a very long break. Then, in Florida, the community was so bikeable along the East Coast that I sold my car and relied on my bike solely for work, and errands, and everything. Then, moving to Chicago, it was very different road biking. I didn’t bike for the first three weeks I was here, because I was afraid to bike along the road, but then I adjusted to biking in the city versus biking in a small beach town.
I think that there’s a lot of hostility between drivers and bikers, and that everyone could just be a little kinder to each other. I think that drivers feel that the road belongs to them, when, in reality, it’s a shared road and a shared space, and there’s a lot of entitlement with just giving us the bike lane at all. Just respecting each other, just respecting bikers more, would make biking better.
