My First Friend
By Avi Stopper, Bike Streets Founder
For as long as I have been working on Bike Streets – 7 years now – I’ve said that if I can get my wife to ride her bike, it’ll be an indication that the project is succeeding. Alas, my bike has usually been locked up alone.
My wife was my first Friend when we launched the Friends feature on Bike Streets. It felt aspirational. But since then, in the last few weeks, she’s ridden once by herself and three times with me. For her, that’s an increase in riding of infinity percent.
It’s exactly why we created Friends: so those of us who are already comfortable riding bikes around town have a way to get our bike curious friends on two wheels on a regular basis. We set the bar low by design: the goal is to ride once a week to any destination no matter how close it is. Just getting on a bike is a triumph.
In many ways, my wife is the epitome of the type of person Bike Streets is trying to get to ride: someone who theoretically likes the idea of biking, is concerned about riding in traffic, and studiously avoids the Emerson bike lane on the west side of Wash Park.
An important element of her trips is their distances: all four have been less than two miles. A bike trip of even a mile is a win. Because it’s about riding, not about riding huge distances.
The first ride was a 1-mile trip to the gym. The second ride was a 2-mile trip for our anniversary dinner at Table 6, a Bike Streets Destination. Yes! She rode bikes with me to a fancy dinner, dressed up. It was amazing.
The third trip was in our cargo bike and less than a mile to Wash Park for a picnic. And the fourth trip was two miles for a family dinner.
This is what Bike Streets is trying to create all across Denver: people of all ages and abilities on bikes going to all kinds of places. Any ride counts, no matter the distance.
It’s been said that the health of an active transportation network in a city can be determined by the number of women who use it. A writer in Scientific American went so far as to describe women riding bikes in urban environments as an “indicator species” of the quality of the bike network.
Did Friends on the Bike Streets app convert my wife into someone who rides her bike regularly? Maybe. Being married to a bike aficionado probably also has something to do with it. But whatever the exact reason, it’s a win to have one new person out there riding and swapping bike trips for car trips.