ChiWhoBike #93
I grew up in a very typical Chicago suburb: very car oriented, where bikes were considered just toys for kids and teenagers, until they got their driver’s license. But my parents are immigrants from Germany, and I spent summers in Germany with them, and my grandmother, who was in her sixties and seventies, would ride her bike into the center of town to do volunteer work. That really made a deep impression on me, to see a grownup adult riding a bike for transportation. Then, in my twenties, in the 1990s, I lived in Beijing, China for a couple years, in the last Halcyon days of biking in Beijing. Everyone rode bikes, and I did too, and that’s where I really first got a taste of how convenient it is to ride a bike for transportation.
If you’re just starting out biking, don’t overthink it. Don’t think that you need to be in fantastic shape, or need to know how to change a flat. I mean, I’ve had one flat fire in 30 years of biking here, and there’s always a bike shop nearby. That’s the beauty of urban biking, right? Don’t feel like you need special clothing or anything, you can just get on your bike and ride. Having said that, I think the gateway drug for decades has been the Lakefront Trail. So go on the Lakefront Trail, take neighborhood streets to get there or try to go on off street trails first, like the river trails and the 606 Bloomingdale Trail. Then as you get more comfortable, work your way up to bike lanes and that sort of thing.
Since I’ve been riding, the number of bicyclists out there is exponentially more. Thirty years ago, it truly was like the kamikaze bike messengers in the Loop, and the wannabe Lance Armstrong’s on their way to the Lakefront Trail. And the very rare person like me. But in the last 15 years, especially with the introduction of the Divvy program, and the fact that more and more young people are coming into the city, who are maybe more open to bicycling, there’s just been a huge growth of bicyclists, and that helps everyone. More bicyclists out there makes us more visible, and makes everyone more aware that we are a real contingent of stakeholders who have a stake in the design of the streets.
