Monday, March 11, 2013

National Motorist Ride Your Bike to Work Day


In 2013, Motorist Ride Your Bike to Work Week will be May 13-17 and Motorist Ride Your Bike to Work Day will be Friday, May 17. Sometimes in Los Alamos, we do Motorist Ride Your Bike to Work Day on Thursday, since close to half the work force works alternate Fridays.

Last year was a bit of what we in The Business might call a fizzle, due to problems of a bureaucratic nature (I'm sure you are shocked to hear that) and a poor location of the goodies stash. Lesson learned.

Its not to early to think about this. So if anyone wants to form a steering committee and try again, I'm game to suggest a better set of goals and objectives. But please, no repeat of last year.

Pardon the sarcasm in the above, but for those who regularly use the bicycle as transportation rather than as a car rooftop ornament, every day is bike to work (or play, or school) day.  This annual event is a bit of a cheerleading effort to not only recognize those who normally get off their hind ends and use the bicycle as transportation, but an effort to try to get others to join us.  More butts on bikes has a bad ring to it if pushed indiscriminately, but a bigger constituency gets more notice by the powers that be, as well as an expectation among motorists that cyclists are out there sharing the roads.

I really do wish BTW Week and National Bike Month resulted in more folks riding in June through April as well, but some things are hard to change. Paradigms shift slowly, as does the CO2 content of the earth's atmosphere.
2006 Bike to Work participants headed to LANL

3 comments:

Ian Brett Cooper said...

And here we go again. The yearly cycling festival for those who 'want' to cycle but can't be bothered to get their lard-asses out of their car seats. Great!

Maybe I'll celebrate by walking my commute this year, while giving each 'cyclist' I see the one-finger salute.

Steve A said...

Unlike last year, I might pass up the day - by ceasing working. That puts me one up on Ian other than I'll probably go get the goodies and maybe even listen to the speeches this year...

Little Jimmy said...

Sad that BTWD doesn't work here. But then again this community has never been really big on having or cultivating a sense of Community (big C).

I always thought it would be pretty damned funny if we could get a "Critical Mass" organized where 1,000 cyclists jump onto Diamond drive at the Metzger's Mobil station at 7:45 a.m. during the morning Rush hour and proceed to ride in both lanes at an extremely leisurely pace up to the VAP.

But everyone's so damned orderly and compliant here, and I suspect that at least one whacko, sensing an impending tardy arrival for his PowerPoint presentation to the Corporate Overlords, would flip out and run down a gaggle of cyclists in a mad rush to get to his or her meeting. Definitely not worth it.