Bike Month is Here!
The month of May has been celebrated as Bike Month around the country for 64 years. We celebrate the joy of riding, the way that riding for transportation or exercise or hobby can make us healthier, save us money, and connect us with nature and our community. We encourage others to join us in enjoying the benefits of biking, and we call for safer streets so that everyone can ride.
While that remains true, this year’s Bike Month will be like no other. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the stay-at-home orders that are keeping it contained, have forced us all to consider what is important, what is essential for keeping ourselves, our families, and our neighbors safe from this virus. At Bike Durham, we’ve had to consider how travel is changing in our community, and how we should adapt.
With our roots as a bicycle advocacy organization, we have cheered the sights of more people getting out on their bikes for transportation and exercise with fewer cars on the road. As an organization that is wrestling how to center racial equity in our work, we have observed that racial disparities that persist in our community reveal themselves in terms of whose travel is made more difficult through physical distancing requirements, and who has an easier time of keeping themselves and their families safe by staying-at-home. This awareness led us to join many in our community in supporting essential workers, especially those operating and riding GoDurham buses. At the same time we have questioned why Durham hasn’t yet followed the lead of other communities in designating slow streets and neighborhood bike routes to give more space for people to walk and bike safely in this time of required physical distancing.
As we have looked for a way forward through this time, we have tried to keep these priorities in mind:
Everyone in Durham should have safe access to food, medical care, mental health care, and recreational space. Essential workers should have safe access to their jobs and while at their jobs. Safe access now goes beyond traffic safety, freedom from crime and over-enforcement by the police, and extends to safety from COVID-19 through physical distancing, hand washing, and face coverings.
Changes to our streets or transit system should be unwinding racial and economic inequities, not perpetuating it.
When moving about in Durham, everyone must consider not just how our actions affect our own safety, but the safety of others. We need to learn how to expand our thinking about “rules of the road” to cover physical distancing.
These are all priorities that Bike Durham has held, but the pandemic and stay-at-home order has brought them into starker relief and forced us to wrestle with what is essential. We have tried to acknowledge the differences that people are experiencing - supporting those who are finding their way back onto bikes as well as those essential workers who are anxious about safely getting to work on GoDurham. This remains a work-in-progress, but it is the spirit in which we are carrying our work forward into Bike Month.
Just in time for Bike Month, we’ve added a subscription to the RidewithGPS app as a new Bike Durham member benefit. This May, when you’re ready to get out on your bike, we encourage you to try the bike routes we’ve planned in the RidewithGPS (including May the Fourth Be With You, Koala, and a tour of NCCU’s campus). They’ll be fun, and the app should enhance the experience and give us a sense of togetherness, even while we’re keeping physical distance. We’ll have webinars on topics ranging from using RidewithGPS to how to select safety equipment for yourself and bike to a panel on how travel has changed in Durham during the pandemic. We’ll be profiling Durham bike riders throughout the month and encouraging you to share your stories about why and how you bike Durham. We’ll close the month with a Scavenger Hunt week that we each can do on our own, while sharing the experience virtually, with prizes for winners. More details on all of these activities can be found at bikedurham.org/bikemonth.
We want to thank our sponsors the Way to Go Durham program of the City of Durham, and the GoPerks program at GoTriangle.
We also want to thank our partners in rethinking Bike Month and pulling this together - staff from the City of Durham, the Durham-Chapel Hill-Carrboro MPO, North Carolina Central University, Duke University, and the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission.