May is the month for bicycles

Ladies and gentlemen, don’t start your engines. Instead, get out your bike for this month’s 29th annual Bicycle Commuter Contest, sponsored by Intercity Transit.

Last year’s contest drew about 1,700 participants and it would make its organizers awfully happy if this year’s participants broke the 2,000 mark.

It’s free to enter, and people can participate as individuals or as workplace teams. There are prizes for everyone at the end of the month, and the biggest rewards go to those who ride the most commuter miles and who bike to work the most days of the month.

The biggest benefit of this contest — aside from reducing pollution and making participants healthier — may be its nudge to local governments to plan street improvements that make biking safer and more appealing. Bicycle and pedestrian advocates across the country have already created a vision of “complete streets,” designed to accommodate safe travel by bikes and pedestrians as well as cars. In a growing number of cases they’ve lobbied for and won protected bike lanes — that is, bike lanes with barriers between bikers and cars that improve biker safety enough that parents with small children feel safe biking even on busy streets.

But bike lanes are not without their detractors, especially when creating them eliminates curbside parking or reduces the number of lanes for cars. Sharing the road is still a foreign concept to a lot of drivers.

Creating bike lanes in existing streets can also be logistically difficult and expensive. In Lacey, bicyclists showed up at a recent city council meeting to protest a decision to widen College Street between Lacey Boulevard and 37th Street because the project won’t include bike lanes. But city staff report that creating even an unprotected bike lane would cost an extra $1.7 million and require eliminating three additional houses. They say it wouldn’t be worth it for the very small number of bicyclists brave enough to use unprotected bike lanes on that crowded, relatively high speed arterial. And, they point out that there are alternative routes for cyclists, including the Chehalis Western trail.

That shines a light on the division between “the fit and fearless” and those of us who are unlikely to ride bikes where cars are whizzing past just a few feet away. Building protected bike lanes can be so expensive that Olympia is accommodating this constituency by designating “family friendly” bike routes through residential neighborhoods to minimize the need for bike travel on arterials.

The city of Olympia also has a Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Committee that has put the vision of “complete streets” front and center on the city’s agenda, and ensured that the needs of bicyclists will be incorporated into the emerging Downtown Strategy.

In a nation threatened by climate change and beset by air pollution and obesity, riding a bike is a gift to us all. So we hope this will be a record-breaking year for the Bicycle Commuter Contest — one that will encourage all our local governments to make traveling by bike safer, easier, and far more common.

To sign up, see bit.ly/1q2sYzV.

This story was originally published May 6, 2016 at 1:46 AM with the headline "May is the month for bicycles."