NEWS&OPINION:: May 11, 2005

Lucinda Means: ‘Too young and too great to go’

By LAWRENCE COSENTINO

Friday, April 29, with the state’s highest-profile showcase for bicycle advocacy

set to begin within two weeks, the bicycling community lost a much-loved friend and a dedicated, articulate spokeswoman.

Lucinda Means, the first executive director of the League of Michigan Bicyclists, died in her sleep Friday, April 29, at 49. An autopsy indicated she had suffered a stroke.

Born in Boston, Means came to Michigan in 1997 from San Francisco, where she was a volunteer leader in bicycle advocacy. She brought passion for bicycling and straight-shooting lobbying skills to the League of Michigan Bicyclists. As director, she helped usher that organization into an era of ambitious, multi-geared cooperation among like-minded groups such as the Rails to Trails Conservancy and the Mid-Michigan Environmental Action Council. “Smart Commute wouldn’t have happened if not for her,” says event organizer Jessica Yorko.

Nancy Krupiarz of Michigan Rails to Trails, who worked with Means on many bike

advocacy projects over the years, says Means’ accomplishments reminded her of Malcolm Gladwell’s “tipping point,” the moment when a long-fought-for cause — like civil rights or bicycle-friendly cities — becomes inevitable by dint of many small efforts. “She knew how to make the connections between people who make things happen,” Krupiarz says. “Her philosophy was that everybody is valuable.”

Means had a sharp edge, too, and often used blunt language to make the case for bicycling in Michigan. In a recent article for the Michigan Ecology Center, she decried state highways as a “bedlam” full of “stressed-out SUV-ers going mano a mano with each other, rocketing over moonscape roads while brandishing cell phones.” She compared the trail of development that follows expanding metropolitan traffic patterns to a “scorpion’s tail” dragged along by “so-called pioneers” who unwittingly put themselves in worse danger than they were in the “old, crime-ridden neighborhood.”

Behind the passionate rhetoric lay Means’ oft-repeated mission to make bicycling an integral, standardized component of the state’s transportation and development plans. Means fought hard for such improvements as paved shoulders, wide right lanes, striped on-road bike lanes, off-road bike paths and well-designed bike racks, as well as bike awareness education for auto and truck drivers.

The relatively small price tag for such measures, argued Means, is vastly outweighed by the benefits. “Unlike driving,” she wrote, “bicycling improves quality of life for individuals and their communities.” Her liaisons went far afield from the traditional bike-oriented organizations, and recently included a conspicuous pitch for bicycling as part of a wellness campaign mounted by the Michigan Department of Community Health.

John Lindenmayer, board member of the League of Michigan Bicyclists, has received many e-mails laden with reminiscences of Means and tributes to her work, and shared some of them with City Pulse readers.

“It will be difficult to find someone with her unique attributes and zeal to carry on the cause of bicycling both in Michigan and the nation,” wrote Ken Hendrick of Michigan Rails to Trails.

“We have all lost a true friend of bicycling,” wrote Connie Szabo Schmucker of the Indiana Bicycle Coalition, who met with the well-traveled Means at many bike shows and conventions in Chicago. “It will be impossible to know the extent that Lucinda has improved bicycling, not only in Michigan, but the entire nation.”

Schmucker’s personal recollections of Means echo those of many others. “I have always been impressed by her wisdom and humor and her ability to boil down issues to their essentials.”

Poet Jim Crissman, another admirer of Means, wrote that “obfuscation, beating around the bush was not Lucinda’s style. She wanted it straight up.” As a result, wrote Crissman, Means hated poetry, although she didn’t hold his vocation against him.

In his own statement, Lindenmayer praised his colleague’s devotion to the “core mission” of the League of Michigan Bicyclists: making Michigan a bicycle-friendly state. “Michigan is a better place because of her passion, strong will and relentless determination,” he wrote.

“When I learned of her passing,” wrote Kelly Thayer of the Michigan Land Use Institute, “it seemed as unnatural to me as reading about myself in the past tense. She was too young and too great to go.”

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