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Community Corner

Ride Your Bike to Work

The annual Bike-to-Work Week kicks off Monday and thousands of commuters across America will be pedaling to work—how many in the South Bay will be among them?

Bike-to-Work Week is almost here—have you figured out your route to the office yet? Did you use the Google Maps biking directions feature?

Do you work close enough to ride your bike the whole way, or will you need a bus or train for part of the way?

Every spring these questions are asked and answered during national Bike-to-Work Week, which encourages America’s workers to park their cars and give biking a chance as their commuter transportation, and every year more and more people give it a try.

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Seventeen percent of last year’s participants had never rode their bike to work before, according to a survey conducted by Washington, D.C.-based Bike-to-Work Week organizers.

Twenty-two percent of those surveyed reported biking to work more often after giving it a try, and a surprising 10 percent reported making it their regular way of commuting.

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As an advocate for increased bicycle transportation, I want to invite you to join the trend for at least one workday during the week of May 15.

I know that biking to work doesn’t work for everyone—some folks work too far from the South Bay, and others need their car or truck to do their jobs. Some people like me work out of a home office and have no work commute.

But plenty of others live within 10 miles of their workplace—similar to the many people who participate in Bike-to-Work Week every year from our local industries, including Aerospace Corp., Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Direct TV and others.

Now there is undeniable motivation for many more of you to consider pushing the pedals of your bike to get to work instead of putting the pedal to the metal in your car.

Let’s start with the . Then add the stress and aggravation of South Bay rush-hour traffic jams, gridlock, and the bumper-to-bumper grind.

Factor in the air pollution; greenhouse gas emissions and climate change your fossil-fueled vehicle generates with each and every mile. Then multiply the tremendous physical and mental health benefits you get from biking over driving—and you should have more than enough inspiration to get you to try biking to work.

Those of us lucky enough to live and ride in the South Bay are blessed with one of the best climates in the world for bicycling anywhere we want to go. But what we don’t have here, yet, is a bicycle-friendly community with well-planned, interconnected bike routes that make our streets safe, accessible and easy to ride on.

Bike routes run short distances, stop and start without reason or directions, and put bicyclists on heavily congested roads with no safe space for bicycles—like most of PCH.

If you want to travel along the beach bike path, you have a route to go south-north. But if you need to travel east-west, you’re out of luck.

But that’s all going to start changing once the South Bay Bicycle Coalition presents the to the public this summer for review and comments.

The plan will connect , , , El Segundo, Torrance, Gardena and Lawndale with routes that will allow you to ride to schools, shopping, restaurants, banks, post offices and the other places we want to go, including work, and not just once a year.

The plan to be reviewed this summer is the result of community workshops held in each of the seven cities covered by the plan. The South Bay Bicycle Coalition will be holding another round of community workshops to go over the proposed plan and get public feedback in coming months. 

So if it’s not easy for you to ride to work now, but you’d like to be able to some day, come on out to the workshops and support the South Bay Bicycle Master Plan.

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