Now is the time......

....to get cycling onto the governmental radar. I think we have a unique opportunity right now to raise the awareness of cycling. We have been seeing more people looking to bikes as an actual viable alternative to cars for some trips. Folks are buying hybrid bikes with racks to get to work. Most will site rising gas prices as the impetus for looking at cycling but are also attracted to the exercise, weight loss, reduced stress and general "green-ness" of riding. Several of these factors are colliding head first into each other and may give us the best opportunity in our lifetimes to push a cycling agenda. What we need is folks out there telling the money-holders that this is important to us.

The importance of this has been creeping up on me the last handful of years. When we build local trails, I am happy as a pig-in-slop just pushing dirt around. I seem to be much less inclined to sit in front of the TV screen with a keyboard but it seems to be at least as important as pushing dirt. When the IMBA Trail Care Crew visited in 2005, we were able to demo some trail machinery and I told bOb that somehow I was going to find a way to buy us a skid steer of our very own. In 2007 I wrote grants that bought us a Ditch Witch via Lowes Home Improvement, a Volvo mini excavator via Duke Energy and $5K worth of hand tools via the Adopt-a-Trail program. In our estimation, one machine hour is equal to 10 man hours which helps cut down on the number of volunteers that we need to coerce. I probably spent a total of 5 or 6 hours on the grants and they saved us hundreds of volunteer hours already which will increase every time we cut new trail. Sounds like a pretty sound return on investment??

Last month, I was invited to join the board of the Downtown Statesville Development Corporation (DSDC) which is in charge of keeping our downtown healthy and is funded via a property tax on downtown properties. Another project is the beginnings of the Carolina Thread Trail program that aims to tie together 15 counties via a system of greenways. It is a very ambitious program but it won't happen if we don't start somewhere. Because of our involvement with the state park trail, I was invited to join the citizens Park Advisory Committee. It seems like each of these organizations has some overlap in membership which means you see a lot of the same people in different settings. In each of these, I keep pushing cycling with an emphasis on the particular venue. AT DSDC meetings, it is using bikes to get people into town to shop which means more dollars for the merchants. At the LNSP PAC, it is building more trails to get more park attendance which means more dollars for the park. At the Thread trail meetings, it is pushing for more people to visit the area which means more dollars for the county. See a pattern here?

The last meeting we (Daryl, Shawn, wES and I) attended was the public forum for the Iredell County Park and Rec master plan. This is the plan that will guide the parks department for the next 10-15 years. We all gave up a ride night to go sit in and listen to the plan. They did mentions a couple of cycling related options in the plan and we just made sure that they realized there was interest in these activities and that all parks didn't have to be centered around stick and ball fields.

I guess the whole point of this is to go out and do SOMETHING, attend a meeting, push some dirt, call your county commissioners, buy some tools, write a grant proposal.....anything to help improve the atmosphere for cycling. If you don't get involved, you lose the right to complain about it! This is our time.