Smart Commute takes over greater
Lansing for one sane week
By LAWRENCE COSENTINO
How many exercise plans can guarantee you’ll lose at least 2,000 pounds
on the first day?
Next week’s regional Smart Commute, from May 16 to May 20, is an
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
All but invisible to motor vehicles whizzing by, this ancient tree (“present
at the signing of the Constitution” says the plaque) will greet bike
commuters from Delta Township as they cruise down Willow Street next week.
unprecedented drive to get people from all over Greater Lansing
to leave their two-ton cell on wheels in the garage and propel themselves to
work for one liberating week.
The organizers have carefully worked out safe and scenic routes from outlying
areas such as Holt, Haslett, Okemos, Groesbeck and Delta Township, threading
their way to East Lansing and downtown Lansing and back each morning and evening.
(There are 10 routes in all; see accompanying box for registration and route
information.)
Volunteers will be there to lead the commutes, with Beaner’s coffee, bagels
and other refreshments on hand for fuel. Useful information — including
a handbook for bicycling in Michigan and a slick new mid-Michigan trail and
greenway map — will be passed out. Even the downtown Lansing YMCA Wellness
Center is getting into the act, offering free showers and lockers at journey’s
end.
The event’s organizers see it is as a serious joyride, a tantalizing preview
of the bicycle-friendly community greater Lansing could become.
Smart Commute will also give an outworn American tradition a mass kick in the
Smart Commute ‘05
Mayor Tony Benavides has declared the week of May 16-20 Smart Commute week
in Lansing, citing the many benefits of bicycling for individuals and the
community. Registration for the event is free. Visit the Mid-MEAC Web site
at www.midmeac.org or contact Jessica Yorko at (517) 214-5684.
rear bumper. Once heralded as the democratic, blue-sky model
of convenience, the killer commute has become a gas-guzzling, stress-inducing,
obesity-fostering habit that brings out the inconsiderate, impatient slob inside
everyone.
And that’s not just a rant from the fringe. Every statistic in sight,
from your blood pressure and weight on the bathroom scale to the price of oil
on the world market, makes a titanium-framed case for biking to work.
The chief organizer of the event says it comes down to one simple formula. “This
is about quality of life,” says Jessica Yorko of the Mid-Michigan Environmental
Action Council, chief sponsor of the event. “On a bicycle, you experience
life more fully. You get to work and you won’t feel like a robot that
just goes home and goes back to work and doesn’t get to live.”
Without a system of extensive trails, secondary lanes and buffer zones for
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
The home stretch downtown follows Kalamazoo Avenue, one of a handful of
area arteries equipped with a bike lane. Smart Commuters will get a greenways
map detailing bike lanes, trail and greenways throughout the tri-county
area.
bikers, Yorko admits the bike commute can be a tough sell
in greater Lansing. She hopes the volunteer guidance, group camaraderie and
other incentives offered in next week’s experiment will embolden the reluctant
to get on the roads, perhaps for the first time, and then get on their legislators
to make the area bike-friendly.
“We want it to be a good experience for the people who are participating,
but we know that Lansing has a long way to go,” she says. “It’s
a combination of ‘give it a try’ and visualize what we could do.”
“The best thing you can do for cycling in Michigan is get out and bike,”
says Nancy Krupiarz of sister organization Rails to Trails. “Try it. We
need to raise the visibility of biking. Then, when a road is resurfaced, people
can tell their legislators they want a bike lane included, and everybody wins.”
bAn Amsterdam of the mindb
Even before the Smart Commuters apply their mettle to the pedal, the event has
already made a bold statement on the future of urban planning in mid-Michigan.
By patching together a mosaic of lesser-traveled secondary roads, residential
streets and main arteries with wide sidewalks, the organizers have superimposed
a virtual greenway system — an Amsterdam of the mind — over the
region’s existing tangle of suburban sprawl and haphazard development.
A bright example is the Smart Commute’s “North Okemos” pathway,
one of two routes I previewed last week (at a slow pace enforced by a winter
of driving and other forms of sloth). Heading into East Lansing from Okemos,
the route is a throwback to simpler times when Grand River was known as the
Detroit-to-Lansing Plank Road — now Hamilton Road, a two-lane blacktop
where you can hear woodpeckers and smell woodsmoke as you cruise along.
The commute’s serenity is especially amazing in view of the fact that
just a block north sprawls one of the region’s densest clusters of retail
traffic and development, centered on the Meridian Mall and the suckling strip
malls that surround it.
In accordance with the planners’ goals for all the routes, the North Okemos
path manages to find a silver lining to every cloud of congestion. After leaving
Hamilton, the route follows busy Grand River (via sidewalk) at its most spectacular
point — the heavily wooded Grand Trunk viaduct, which offers aerial views
of passing trains straight out of a World War II movie. The path quickly tucks
itself into pleasant residential blocks all the way to the East Lansing campus
of MSU.
Even here, amid suburban streets as regular as a peach pie crust, the benefits
of biking are sweet and simple. How else would most folks ever find out about
the incredible tulip display at 1529 Cahill St.?
All the routes offer a range of wonders and curiosities undiscoverable by auto.
The Delta Township pathway, for example, follows Willow Avenue eastward toward
a labyrinth of shaded, historic downtown neighborhoods, offering a selection
of delights along the way. About two blocks east of Waverly Road, for example,
stands an ancient maple tree, honored by a nearby plaque for being present “at
the time of the signing of the United States Constitution.” Thousands
of motorists have driven by the tree without appreciating its venerable form.
Just further east, a huge wall mural of ancient Rome next to DeLuca’s
Italian restaurant offers a virtual view of the Colosseum. Yards away, a fascinating
mountain of scrap metal offers a diverting game of “what the hell is that?”
It’s not the garden path at Versailles, but it’s mighty real, and
there’s a smile every quarter mile. Near the scrapyard, for instance,
is a telephone pole with a sign nailed on: “Lose that weight in ‘98.”
Whew — still plenty of time to pedal.
The humanity dividend
The sights on the Smart Commute paths offer cheap entertainment, but Yorko
Lawrence Cosentino/City Pulse
The tranquil North Okemos rout follows Hamilton Road, just a block away
from Grand River’s retail Babylon.
says that considerate, polite human interaction is what turns
her on most about biking. My North Okemos odyssey echoed her experience. Even
in the heart of the suburbs, it’s hard to hang on to the myth of the cold
suburban no-man’s-land when riding a bike. Gardeners look up and nod.
Pedestrians and porch-sitters wave and smile. One kid even waved a lit sparkler
at me (festively, not aggressively).
It’s true that bikes are not always made to feel welcome on the roads,
and part of the Commute’s mission is to remind drivers of their obligation
to share the road. But Smart Commute is not an aggressive, take-back-the-streets
rally. The planners have avoided high-traffic arteries where tempers might flare
and concentrated on keeping the pulse steady.
Besides, bike commuters reap a humanity dividend cars almost never collect.
If you look confused, suffer equipment breakdown or simply slow down to look
at something — in other words, at times when a motorist will lean on the
horn and scream at you on a highway — chances are someone will offer a
helping hand.
For example, when a man driving a truck spotted me consulting my map of the
North Okemos route, he got out of the truck (leaving it idling in the street)
and grandly gesticulated me on my way with a handshake and an apology he didn’t
have time to help more. I looked at the yellow ribbon sticker and American flag
on his truck, then at the “NO WAR” sign on the house nearby, and
began to think differently about the rift that is supposed to be tearing at
the fabric of society. It seems real enough in the press, but in suburbs like
this one, the so-called “red” and “blue” Americas lap
pretty quietly at the same shoreline of (reasonably) fresh air and civility.
At length, the North Okemos route slouches toward the Gomorrah of tank tops,
amber glass shards and Greek letters that is Michigan State University, before
it funnels down the Kalamazoo Avenue bike lane to the heart of downtown, completing
a most interesting triple panorama of human habitats.
The trail ahead
Ambitious as it is, Smart Commute is only a baby step in the long process of
making all of mid-Michigan uniformly bike friendly. On Nov. 20, 2004, Parks
and Recreation personnel from dozens of communities in Eaton, Ingham and Clinton
counties gathered to get their gears in line. Besides the Lansing-area effort
to vastly increase the amount of trails, bike lanes and pedestrian buffers,
the group has an even more far-reaching goal: a trail system linking all three
counties to each other, plugging in turn into a larger, state-girdling trail
system.
What’s needed next, Yorko says, is a coherent plan — “something
that’s down on paper” — that citizens can debate and officials
can look over.
“We need citizens to go to their township meetings, city council meetings
and make phone calls to get these things on the agenda,” Yorko says. “We
need citizens to go out and say, ‘I want this,’ because that’s
the only way elected officials will put it into policy and it’ll ever
get any money.”
Yorko urges all interested people, whether or not they participate in Smart
Commute, to contact the Mid-Michigan Environmental Action Council. “We’ll
get their name,” Yorko says, “so when a meeting is coming up in
their municipality, I can call.”
It’s still a tough sell, but Nancy Krupiarz of Rails to Trails is pleased
with the progress the state has made thus far. “We’ve come a long
way,” Krupiarz says. “What’s needed is a local driver to help
things along from year to year.” She points to Traverse City’s model
trails system and its advocacy group, Traverse Area Rails to Trails as such
a “driver,” and praises the Mid-Michigan Environmental Action Council
for stepping into a similar role in the Lansing area.
Yorko agrees that the tipping point toward a bike-friendly mid-Michigan may
be near. Among positive recent developments in this area are the Capital Area
Transportation Authority’s decision to equip its buses with bike racks
and install bike lockers at three area transportation hubs.
“And a lot of our economic developers are starting to make the shift,”
Yorko says, “but it’s been really hard for them to get off the old
school where you just create jobs.”
That model just doesn’t play anymore, Yorko says. “All the kids
I graduated with said, ‘I’m going to live where it’s fun,
and then find a job I like.’ We’re not going to do what our parents
did — live in the suburbs, make a long car commute to a job every day
— because it’s not fun.”
