- Read Peter Furth,’s “Bicycle Infrastructure for All,” in Cycling for Sustainable Cities.
2. Find a 2-3 mile route that you are comfortable riding by bike. It would be ideal if it is a route that has some practical significance to you. (Route from home to school, to shopping….). Make sure you are familiar with the route and the traffic on it. Ride this route, taking all necessary safety precautions. While you are riding focus on the road and the vehicles around you. When you get finished write 500 words about your experience. Did you feel safe? What things made you feel safe? Were there things that made you feel unsafe? How did your route fit into Furth’s typology of different bicycle routes? How did you experience your environment? (If you have the ability, you might want to drive the same route and compare the experience of driving and biking.).
I don’t want you to do anything you are not comfortable doing. Here is a bike map of Raleigh showing greenways and bike lanes. If you aren’t comfortable riding on roads, you can choose a route that is exclusively on greenways. Also if you don’t have a bike, you can use the Cardinal bike share app.
As an example of a route that would be (almost) all on greenways, you could rent a bike at the Cardinal bikeshare docking station at Hillsborough St. and Horne, then cross Hillsborough St. and go through the NCSU campus to get on the Rocky Branch bike path, then go on the Gorman St bike connector, to the House Creek Trail by Meredith College and then after the tunnel, turn right to go up to Whole Foods. Here is a link to that basic route on Google Maps.
If you are uncomfortable riding a bike, here is an alternate way to do this assignment.
3. Look at where you live. Use the time travel app to see where you could get to in 15 minutes of biking. Could you do your grocery shopping? Get to work or school? Imagining you had kids, get them to school? What size would you have to extend your “city” to to include these things?
Be prepared to discuss your findings in class on September 14. Submit through Moodle.