The Vulnerable User Bill finally got approved. There are bike racks throughout downtown and four bike lockers at Union Station. Transport Hartford — a city-specific alternate transportation group — has launched. There are multiple large organized bike rides and many informal ones.
You’d have to be sleeping to think there’s nothing happening here.
This weekend offered more evidence that there is enthusiasm for cycling, both as recreation and as transportation.
Joshua Ploeg, Joe Biel, and Elly Blue stopped at the Emanuel Lutheran Church as part of their month-long Dinner and Bikes tour of the East Coast.
As guests arrived, they could talk to representatives from Hartford Food System and Bike Walk Connecticut. Microcosm Publishing had several tables’ worth of t-shirts, bumper stickers, buttons, books, and zines for sale, most on the themes of transportation and cooking.
Partly, the event was to encourage promote cycling, but it also helped develop community relationships by promoting face-to-face socializing.
Ploeg, a traveling vegan chef and author of This Ain’t No Picnic: Your Vegan Punk Rock Cookbook, prepared a meal served buffet-style. As guests dined, Elly Blue talked about her recent trip to the World Bicycle Forum and her book, Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy, published in 2013.
She noted how in the United States, people are willing to identify as advocates, but are more hesitant to call themselves activists. At the forum, she saw people more readily identifying as both.
Joe Biel, who founded Microcosm Publishing, showed his documentary called Aftermass: Bicycling in a Post-Critical Mass Portland. Not everyone realizes that Portland was not always as bicycle-friendly of a city as it is today. The film shows how Portland cracked down on the monthly bike rides during the 1990s, something hard to imagine in a place that has since earned the title of best city for cycling in the United States.
The crew left Hartford in a biodiesel-powered van for Boston, with stops this week in Maine and Vermont.
That night sparked conversations about reviving the Bike to Dinner/Bike to Beer informal rides that are exactly what they sound like. The next Real Ride is in the planning stages; though not set in concrete, there is the possibility of this one taking a very interesting route. Hartford Critical Mass gathers by the carousel in Bushnell Park at 6pm on the last Friday of each month.