A Bicycle Friendly Community

I consider our little town to be bicycle friendly. The city proper is only about 4 square miles, it”s flat, and you can get almost everywhere via a multi-use path or a 20mph side street. All this makes for easy riding and walking access to our grocery store, c-stores, restaurants, post office, schools etc…
We have a BMX/skate park and the town is also home to 2 annual bicycle events, the Midwest Bicycle Swap which a friend puts on and the Midwest Bicycle Fest which I founded.

Another thing I like about our town as it relates to bike riding is its location. One end our town shares its border with the big city which is full of dining, shopping, and exploring, a lot of this via bike paths. A problem though is that there is nothing connecting our local paths with those in the big city.
If you ride off in the direction opposite the big city you”re almost instantly in the country and on gravel roads which I feel provides for fairly safe and entertaining riding.

Our local government is working towards becoming even more bicycle friendly and I hope I can help in some way with that. I noticed this new sign on one of our main streets the other day…

Although I had already been told of the work to be done on the hike/bike path it was still encouraging to see it in writing and shared with the public.

One important part of bicycle infrastructure that our town is lacking though are bike racks. We are hoping to change this in the near future. I decided to document the few bike racks that I know of.

The schools that are in town have racks.

The library.

A manufacturing business has provided a rack for it”s employees.

The senior Center.

Sadly the only retail business I know of in town that has a bike rack is the video store.