Encourage people to walk, cycle

Editor:

I am grateful to our city for providing the excellent bike trail from the Palo Alto Battlefield to Brownsville’s old cemetery. It is thrilling to ride along the trail and watch birds, rabbits, ground squirrels and the occasional snake as well as see happy families and friends bicycling, jogging and walking their cheerful dogs. Of course, we need to extend the trail, as well as provide a pathway for university students to use to go to and from class.

Now it’s time for the next step: to encourage people to walk and bicycle to their destinations, not only helping us and our children stay fit, but lessening our utter dependence on oil.

I do not deny that oil is in nearly every product we use, from our clothing to our computers, and certainly our bicycles; but if we can rely on our own God-given energy to get from place-to-place, we should do so.

Thus, I am asking every business and school in Brownsville to install bicycle racks to encourage people to use bicycles for their errands and small shopping trips.

How often do we drive our cars to the corner store to pick up a soda pop, for example? Riding my bike to Stripes for breakfast tacos and to PetSmart for birdseed, I had to search for an appropriate pole to which I could chain my bicycle, one that a driver, unaccustomed to seeing a parked bicycle, would not ram into.

Local businesses are anything but welcoming to bicyclists.

As a child in a midsized Indiana town in the ’60s, before we even worried about our "carbon footprint" on the world, my mother asked me countless times to ride my bike down to the corner to pick up a loaf of bread or a carton of milk, and I was used to seeing welcoming bicycle racks wherever I went. Some might say that back then the streets were not as dangerous, but this wasn’t the case. As we do now, we avoided unfamiliar neighborhoods and rarely rode bikes at night.

All the schools had bike racks, for at least half the elementary students bicycled to school. Students have asked me how we got exercise back then since jogging was reserved for athletes in training and nobody I knew worked out in a gym. I tell them that exercise was a part of our lives. At least that was the case with the children.

Drivers are no crazier today than they have ever been, and now we wisely instruct bicyclists to wear helmets. If we can ticket drivers for not wearing seatbelts — and we do, diligently — we can certainly ticket them for traveling and turning in designated bike lanes. We can guarantee safety for bicyclists.

Not only must we provide locations for people to ride bikes recreationally, we must encourage people to make bicycle riding, a relatively fast, cheap, healthy method of transportation, an integral part of their lives.

Businesses and schools, welcome bicyclists! Encourage them to park bikes inside your facilities if need be. Put out some inexpensive bicycle racks as a welcome mat. Follow the lead of civilized cities like Austin, a well-known mecca for Texas bicyclists. Doing so will result in healthier citizens, less reliance on oil and a boost in Brownsville’s image as a good place to visit and to live.

Kathy Trenfield Raines

Brownsville

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