Let's Get Biking

August 14, 3:33 PMCycling ExaminerAlan Snel

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Nothing like a perfect storm of fat Americans and fat gas prices to get average folks to dust off that rusty two-wheeler in the garage and start pedaling America's streets.

We have a movement here -- ordinary people who don't necessarily wear black Lyrcra shorts and colorful jerseys taking to the roads with their bicycles.

People want to bike. They want to get in shape. They want to save money at the gas pump. They want to change their lives by altering their lifestyles.

I see it every day here in Tampa, which will never be confused with bicycle-friendly cities such as Portland or Minneapolis or Davis, Calif.

There was the guy cycling last night with white and red lights blinking on his bike as he pedaled down North Dale Mabry Highway, a busy commercial artery in Tampa.

This morning I looked out my front window and there was a neighbor on a three-speed bike with a metal carrying cage on the side off the rear wheel.

A group of cycling lovers have created a Tampa Bike Co-op, where folks get together to shoot the breeze while fixing up bikes. I know a half-dozen people who love nothing more than taking junked bikes, fixing them up and handing them out to the poor and the homeless. A new group of lady bicyclists in St. Petersburg was formed and they go by the name, "The Skirts." Two local transportation agency women created a bike-commuting program called, "Tampa BayCycle."

I was lucky enough to work with a friend in launching a local bicycle club geared toward average pedalers who have old mountain bikes or hybrids or single-speed cruisers and all they want to do is bike. So we created the Seminole Heights Bicycle Club and filled a bicycling niche not served by the big clubs where the roadies hammer in pace lines zooming at 23 mph. We bike on local city streets, pedaling our leisurely 12 or 14 mph. We're vehicles, you know. Just slow-moving ones.

The roads around here were hardly designed to accommodate bicyclists. That's easy enough to tell by the narrow widths and lack of bike lanes.

But it's slowly changing. A bike lane here, a wider road there. More crumbs than actual meals, but we'll take anything we can get.

But there's a beautiful thing about bicycling. And I call it simply, "The Truth." The bicycle gives you back exactly what you give it. It takes you places that no car could, if you know what I mean.

So buy into bicycling. You'll never be sorry.