In this week’s episode of the “bigcitysmalltown” podcast, Jeff Moore, founder of the SATX Social Ride and Mitchell Keogh, firefighter and avid cyclist who uses the Strava app to unite cyclers, speak with Robert Rivard about the state of cycling in San Antonio— the good, bad and ugly.
SATX Social Ride is a group of cyclists that hosts weekly downtown rides on Tuesday nights, a “rolling show,” including families with kids, dogs in trailers, mountain bike riders, cruisers and people of different skills.
Rivard spoke about the city’s “Decade of Downtown,” and how plans didn’t take into account the needs of the cycling community.
“We’ve become such a wonderful, urban city, compared to what we were, but I don’t feel like cyclists participated in that to the degree that they should have,” Rivard said. “We didn’t create a network of complete streets, we didn’t build a lot of [protected bike lanes].”
With so much development happening in the downtown core, more density is coming to downtown, meaning there will be more cars on the road. Meanwhile, the bike master plan will be adopted next month by the city council.
The bad side, Moore said, was that the cycling community lost the L’Etape San Antonio event by the Tour de France, and the YMCA’s Siclovia event, which has happened twice annually, only happened once this year.
But many local groups fill in for those losses, including the Javelina Bike Jam and Bike Fiesta. It’ll take the city prioritizing protected bike lanes to form a network for people to get to places across town, the guests said. Unless that happens, it’ll be hard to see an increase in cyclists.
“Maybe … we can get more people riding on the streets, and more people riding, running errands and commuting, instead of just recreational riding on the greenways,” Keogh said.
Listen to episode 86 of the bigcitysmalltown podcast below.
