Making Cleveland a healthier community by supporting bicycling

One thing I love about Ohio City is seeing so many people of every sort riding about on bicylces. I see 100s of bicyclists go by my home an hour, during the day and evening, from entire families, to parents with their children in tandem, to clearly down-and-outs with all their Earthly possessions strapped on board. Good for them, and the environment... a core benefit of livable cities.

I was really pleased to see that Toronto is even more bicycle friendly (not to mention public transportation friendly) than the neighborhoods of Cleveland... everyone rides a bike and there are bicycle parking anchors everywhere (see above)... not a few artsy monstrosities but nice, efficient posts with rings... just enough to get the job done. They don't have big bicycle lanes everywhere, but people are so aware that bicycling is part of the culture and economy that it all fits together, despite the hustle and bustle of the crowded, busy streets.

So much of the focus of the pro-bicycle movement in NEO is on how to get suburbanites to commute by bike - we should do more to support and celebrate the urban pioneers and their self-propelled horseless-carriages. Let's put up 100s of these cheap bicycle rings around Cleveland and make a statement.

If we are willing to take another best practice from Toronto, we could replace all the parking meters we have every 30 feet or so along every street in Cleveland (sell them to some unsophisticiated city) with cool solar powered, radio-communicating electronic kiosks every few blocks (this has been proposed for here), and then we could keep track of collections (a problem here)... and fill-in the 1,000s of holes in the concrete where the meters were with the bicycling posts... see below.

Learn from others... they installed a 0.75 Megawatt Lagerway wind turbine right downtown [1], three years before our 0.225 Megawatt turbine on our lakefront, so they seem a good leader to follow.