Matthew Woodyard loves cycling so much he’s taken up something called cyclocross – think of it as a biking form of cross-country-running with a few laps around the track mixed in. He also rides his bike to work up and down the steep hills of the Merriman Valley.
“The topography scares me but I know what I’m getting into,” Woodyard says. “It’s the cars that you have to be aware of, and you just have to ride like nobody sees you.”
And he’s sure not taking his 2-year-old son on such a ride.
Akron is trying to figure out how to become a bike-friendly city. That means taking on the challenges of weather, hills and, most-daunting-of-all, drivers.
Last week, Woodyard was among about a hundred people gathered at the Akron Civic Theatre for a session on ways urban cycling can connect Akron. On one hand, it was an easy sell. These are the people who already think two-wheels-and-peddle-power are a great way to get around.
On the other hand, these are the people, like Woodyard, who know the frustrations.
“Brown Street is a perfect example,” Woodyard says. “It runs from campus to Portage Lakes, and there’s a bike lane printed right there as far as you go. And people are honking at you, yelling at you. You can’t even handle it. It’s just awful.”
With the help of a Knight Foundation grant, and consultants Copenhagenize and 8 80 Cities, Akron is trying to turn that awful experience into a bike network that connects the entire city.
Connecting The Pieces
One of those advocating for that change is Morten Kabell, the former mayor of Copenhagen, Denmark. He told the crowd at the Civic Theatre that, while he was born to cycling, his city was not.
“If you asked most people where I come from, they would not say they were cyclists,” Kabell says. “They are just people trying to get to work.”
Kabell said the change grew in part from escalating gas prices and in part from city leaders who became believers. But mostly, he said, it happened because of the clamor of hundreds of thousands of people who wanted back what he calls the most democratic of public spaces: streets.
But in the U.S., biking is not necessarily democratic. A 2016 study from the University of Vermont found bike-share programs in seven cities are often placed closer to neighborhoods of white, college-educated and higher-earning people.
Recognizing that, Akron ensured places like the Lawton Street Community Center – in a working-class neighborhood in West Akron –were included when it gathered community input last week on how to make biking safer. About a dozen cyclists, escorted by police on their own bikes, set off on a three-mile route outlined by Akron Environmental Engineer Michelle DiFiore.
“So this bike-your-neighborhood event is a demonstration with the community to experience on-road bike lanes, no bike lanes, residential streets and then a busy road without bike lanes again – and then get the thoughts on how those different infrastructure aspects feel,” DiFiore says.
Road Diets
That route took riders along Copley Road. It’s one of the streets Akron has put on a “diet,” slimming it down from four lanes – designed to move cars in and out of town fast – to three lanes for cars and one for bikes, all moving at a slower pace.
Watching from the community center parking lot were Derek Foster and Aristotle Hubbard, pondering the next move on the chess board Foster brought along. They hadn’t known about the biking event, but they see merit in the idea.
“By them having the bike lanes now, I think it’s making a big change for familie,” Foster said. “I see a lot of them riding in the bike lanes and it’s safe.”
"You'd be able to hang out with your families a little bit more if there was more active places and you felt comfortable and secure in going," Hubbard added.
Copenhagen’s Kabell listed “safety, safety, safety” as the top three concerns that have to be addressed for any city to become bike-friendly. Akron Planning Director Jason Segedy says in this case, perception absolutely is reality.
“I think it is a matter of creating those separated bike lanes,” Segedy says. “People kind of dip their toe in the water, so to speak. Try it, kind of build some confidence.”
Building that confidence on city streets means building at least some protected bike lanes separated from cars by street design, barriers, planters or even rows of parked cars. Segedy acknowledges those will take money in a city that doesn’t have a lot of extra cash.
Kabell maintains the payoff on that investment in many-fold, coming in the form of everything from public health to road maintenance. But it takes a strategy.
“Basically you need to know where you’re going, also as a city, and to have that strategy to know where you are going to invest in new kinds of infrastructure, in having an efficient infrastructure a safe infrastructure,” Kabell says.
That strategy could include ways around, under or over some of Akron’s topographical challenges, including the steep climb north of downtown.
But a whole lot of strategizing won’t do much about one final hurdle: winter weather. Segedy says he’d be happy for even eight months of the year when Akronites choose bikes.
