Mayors Take To Two Wheels For National Bike To Work Day
MIAMI-DADE (CBSMiami) – Two mayors and an Olympian biked to work Friday as part of (of course) National Bike To Work Day.
Miami-Dade Mayor Carlos Gimenez hopped on his bike at his Coconut Grove home, rode to Metrorail and took the train to County Hall in downtown Miami, CBS4 news partner The Miami Herald reports.
Key Biscayne Mayor Frank Caplan, a lawyer whose office is on Brickell Avenue, planned to pedal from his home on the Rickenbacker Causeway's bike trail.
Also along for the ride: former bike messenger and 1984 L.A. Games track cycling silver medalist Nelson Vails, the first African American to win an Olympic medal in the sport.
The two mayors and the former Olympian met at 8:15 a.m. at the Metrorail University Station, where they were joined by Miami Mayor Tomás Regalado and some other elected officials, at least for a ceremonial ride around the station, before setting off for the office.
The idea: to show bike commuting is safe and doable, especially by combining transit and existing, designated bikeways.
The public was welcome to join in, too. Mechanics from Mack Cycle were on hand for bike-safety checks and last-minute adjustments — important if you're dusting off a long-out-of-use bike — and also provided wheels and helmets for any bike-less mayors jonesing to ride. Mack Cycle also invited Vails, a California resident who happened to be in South Florida for another event.
County bike planner David Henderson planned to escort Caplan, Vails and any other cyclists who rode to Brickell and downtown Miami, mostly using the M-Path trail that runs underneath the elevated Metrorail tracks. Henderson said he hoped to leave the station by 8:45 a.m. A Facebook group, 2103 Miami Bike to Work, also coordinated rides to work. Attendees received free T-shirts.
Though Bike to Work day has been a minor fixture on the calendar for years, this year's high-profile event comes amid a boom in cycling for recreation and transportation in Miami, a metro area once seen as hostile to cyclists. Miami and other municipalities have been busy adding bike lanes and shared-lane markings, or sharrows, to streets, but many people who might use their bikes for practical transportation remain intimidated by the city's dense auto traffic.
Yet it's increasingly easy to bike-commute on separated trails, said Carlos Martinez, who has a corporate job downtown at Terremark and has started riding to work twice a week with a colleague from Southwest 152nd Street and Old Cutler Road, almost all the way on off-street paths. The hour-long, 16-mile ride, on a fat-tire bike because the paths are not suitable for skinny-tire road bikes, takes only a few minutes longer than his normal commute by transit, he said.
"By getting my ride in during my commute, I get my workout in and save time to be with my family,'' Martinez said. "When I get to work I'm more energetic. It's a personal choice, but there are a lot of compelling reasons to do it. You can argue health benefits, it's green, it reduces traffic congestion a little bit.''
Martinez, who planned to be at the mayors' Bike to Work ride, encouraged others to join in by writing him at gecko618@gmail.com.
The Bike to Work day caps a new, month-long series of bike-related events during March. Coordinated by the county and dubbed Bike305, the program is designed to publicize the expanding network of interconnected bikeways that link downtown Miami and the southern suburbs of Coral Gables, Key Biscayne, Pinecrest, Palmetto Bay and Cutler Bay.
In addition to the M-Path and the Rickenbacker path, those include the Commodore Trail through Coconut Grove and the trail that runs along Old Cutler Road through Coral Gables all the way to Cutler Bay, where the Biscayne Trail picks up and leads south to Black Point Marina along Southwest 87th Avenue.
Nearly completed is a nine-mile trail that will connect Black Point to the county's Larry and Penny Thompson Park, mostly along a canal right-of-way, among other bike facilities now in planning or construction.
Besides special rides like a barbecue-and-beer trek from Coral Gables to Matheson Hammock Park attended by 75 cyclists last Sunday, the Bike305 calendar also lists other events during March that can be conveniently reached by bicycle.
Those include the Sony Open tennis tournament on Key Biscayne, the Brain Fair sponsored by BikeSafe and the Miami Project to Cure Paralysis on Saturday at the Miami Science Museum, and the popular seafood festival Sunday at the Deering Estate.
Next year, the county plans to expand Bike305 to other areas of the county, said coordinator Sue Kawalerski.
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