Interview

Bike Newton

Biking is a green way to get almost anywhere.Bike-Newton, part of the Green Decade Coalition, is working on getting more people out there biking.

Lois Levin, the leader of Bike Newton was interviewed by THE DAYTIME about what the group is doing.

Q: What are you planning to accomplish with Bike Newton?

Bike Newton is trying to figure out how to make Newton a truly bicycle- friendly city. Many towns are working hard to accommodate bicyclists not only by making it easier and safer to bike but also by coordinating bike routes with adjacent cities and towns.

Getting kids to and from school should be a priority, and middle school kids can lead the way, especially because most of them live within three miles of school. Biking can be made safe around the middle schools if we decide to focus on that. Day Middle School is particularly well situated to be a model school since it is not far from three village centers.

Newton is a perfect place for biking. It has villages where people can get all their needs met: Banks, coffee shops, libraries, schools and restaurants. Biking is environmentally sensible and it’s faster than cars for short trips. Just watch bicyclists from your car. You’ll see how many get to where they’re going sooner because they maintain a steady pace. And, when people get out on their bikes they interact with people more. There is much more face-to-face contact than when we are encased in our cars.

We are thinking about proposing street accommodations that will make people more comfortable doing what they need to do on a bicycle, especially on short trips. I see a lot of bicycles on main thoroughfares such as Commonwealth Avenue and Beacon Street. Bicyclists don’t always know where it is safest to ride — in the middle of the road, on the side of the road, even on the sidewalk at times. We need to provide bike lanes that are clearly and properly marked on these streets, for starters. We have many more ideas, of course, but we need to start somewhere. The Bicycle and Pedestrian Task Force has begun to work with the city to install some “Share the Road” signs. That’s encouraging.

Q: Do you think biking to school is more efficient than walking?

Let’s not put them in competition. Some people like rice and some like baked potatoes. When I was a kid, 100% of the kids walked to school. Now in Newton, just 13% of the kids walk to school. I don’t have information about the percentage of bicyclists; we would be interested to have some data about that. But no matter what the trends have been, we need to encourage walking and bicycling to school. It’s cars we want to discourage. A great many children are being driven to school now.

We can look at it from the standpoint of the each child who’s not getting exercise. At Angier or Pierce, in my neighborhood, there are long lines of traffic, sometimes a block long, at the beginning and end of the school day. It’s often the convenience of the parents that is at stake. They drop off their children before going to work or they have little time to get kids to after-school activities. But driving children to school is not helping them. It reinforces the couch potato syndrome and contributes to obesity. …

We’re putting great stress on the environment with so many cars on the road. The short trips that many of us take to do errands are very energy intensive, which means they create more carbon dioxide per mile. A parent driving a child to school must start up a powerful engine which will continue to give off heat while it cools down; and cars are less efficient at burning fuel when driven while the engine is cold. That heat and fuel contributes to our carbon footprint – disproportionately for short trips.

These are some of the ongoing concerns that led me to start Bike Newton. We believe that if we act locally, we will begin to solve these problems.

Q: What is Bike Newton doing?

Bike Newton is hoping to create a culture where at least six to seven months of the year, people will choose to bike some of the time. Some people in the city bike to food markets and to the bank, library or post office, but only a small number of people do that regularly. We want to increase that number by creating a climate where the risk of accidents is extremely low. That means we have to put some resources into bicycle accommodations, but the return on that investment in reducing traffic will be considerable.

Bike Newton also wants expand bike safety education. If we want to encourage people to do their errands by bike, we have to make it safer, particularly for the majority of us who could be called “traffic-timid” bicyclists. Knowledge about bike safety can build confidence for biking. As more people bike and people start to get used to more bicycles on the road, drivers learn to respect bicycles and anticipate what bicyclists are going to do. Drivers and bicyclists will learn to share the road.

…We are prepared to help. Boston has a bicycle coordinator, Nicole Freedman, who is doing great things; we need to collaborate with her and try to replicate some of Boston’s programs here. (Nicole will be the main speaker at the Bike Newton 2nd Annual Rally and Friends & Family Ride on May 17th, 2009.) We hope the folks in Newton City Hall will call on Bike Newton to help set priorities and make the needed changes. In Fall 2009, Bike Newton, Green Decade and the Newton League of Women Voters will be sponsoring a mayoral candidates’ Transportation Forum to help ensure that transportation issues will be a priority for the next mayor.

Q: What can Day Middle School students do to learn more about biking?

One of the advantages of the Bike Club being a part of the Environmental Club is you can broaden students’ understanding of what we mean by “environmental”. Transportation is just as important as recycling in thinking about how we use our resources. I recommend that Day’s Environmental Club set up one winter and one spring meeting and get kids mobilized. You can use the meetings to present a speaker about bicycle safety or to organize students to help the city choose where to place new bike racks, or to work on mapping convenient bike routes. There are terrific short films you can borrow or rent about bicycling; see the website transportationalternatives.org. It would be interesting and fun to watch the films and have discussions about them afterwards.

Bike Newton is a very democratic movement because anyone can ride a bike and travel short distances, and certainly most students can ride a bike. We feel that biking ought to be a reality, for every school-age kid.

Resources

Bie Newton – www.bikenewton.org

Transportationalternatives.org

Green Decade Coalition Newton – www.greendecade.org

League of American Bicyclists – www.bikeleage.org

Livable Streets Alliance – www.livablestreets.info

Massachusetts Bicycle Coalition – www.massbike.org

© 2009 The Daytime.