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community connections
gram has proved itself a success.
“
The participation has been unbeliev-
able,” says SPOKES director Sheldon
Mains. “We had over 700 visits to the
shop last year.”
One popular program is Learn-to-
Ride, comprising a series of classes that
teach adults bicycle riding and safety skills.
Over the past two years, 90 adults have
participated in the program, and for some,
it was an eye-opening lesson on what they
were truly capable of.
“
Before I was involved with SPOKES,
I would see bicycle commuters or
people just riding for fun, and I was
really impressed by them,” says SPOKES
student­-turned-bike-advocate Hayat
Ahmed. “Once I got my own bike, I
thought, ‘Oh! That could be me!’”
But it wasn’t just learning to ride that
brought confidence to Ahmed. It also was
learning the mechanics of bicycles. “Now,
if I’m out on a ride, I know what to do
when something goes wrong. It is very
powerful to know how to fix something,”
she says.
SPOKES is changing perceptions
about cycling in the community in a vari-
ety ways. For some individuals, traditional
and religious dress is perceived as a barrier
to riding a bike, but SPOKES creates a
community where riding a bike is a nor-
mal activity, regardless of one’s culture,
religion, ethnicity or dress.
“
Like me, most Muslim women cover
their hair and dress modestly by covering
our body except for our face and hands,”
says Ahmed. “So we stand out when rid-
ing a bike because of what we’re wearing;
the community is learning to get used to
seeing women on bikes who are dressed
similar to me, but it’s just not that com-
mon yet. Those of us who started biking
through SPOKES are starting a new
trend. If I can show that I can wear what
I wear and ride a bike, it normalizes it for
others.”
Creating a welcoming community
space is a priority of the program, and
participants value the inclusiveness of
SPOKES. “It had always been a goal
of mine to ride a bike,” recounts Maria
tegration. After a fire in 1990, about 20
percent of the tunnel had collapsed, and
the remainder was in disrepair.
A renaissance of the tunnel began in
2001,
when bike and pedestrian advo-
cates, led by the Marin County Bicycle
Coalition (MCBC), fought off construc-
tion of a parking lot in front of the sealed
tunnel entrance. Nine years and a tre-
mendous amount of dedicated advocacy
and restoration work later, the tunnel
reopened.
Toms says more people—from com-
muters on carbon fiber bikes, to pedestri-
ans walking to work, to runners out for a
jog—discover and use the connector each
day. “I see lots of pedestrians, strollers and
families on the way to the movies or the
farmers’ market,” she adds.
The tunnel not only provides a safe,
non-motorized corridor for county resi-
dents, it’s prepared to facilitate another
transportation mode—light rail—as
well. The rebuilt tunnel was designed to
accommodate the Sonoma-Marin Area
Rail Transit (SMART). While SMART is
not yet ready to bring service through the
corridor, the tunnel will separate light rail
from the biking/walking pathway, a “tun-
nel within a tunnel.”
MINNESOTA
Bicycling for All
The wheels are turning for residents of a
Minneapolis community who thought
they’d never be able to travel by bike.
SPOKES, an outreach effort of the non-
profit Seward Neighborhood Group,
which was funded in part by NTPP, has
put several projects in gear with the mis-
sion of “creating a more informed and
diverse biking and walking community.”
Operating out of a community biking
and walking center in the Seward neigh-
borhood, which has a large East African
community, SPOKES offers a series of
classes that encourage active transporta-
tion and help support increased mobility
for teenagers and adults without vehicles.
And since its inception in 2012, the pro-
CALIFORNIA
Tunnel Vision
for Marin County
Thanks to an underground railroad of
sorts, Christina Toms’ commute is the
definition of multi-modal. From her front
door in Fairfax, Calif., just west of San
Rafael, she hops on her bike and cruises
down to the Larkspur ferry terminal.
There, she catches the ferry that takes her
across the bay to San Francisco. A key link
in that route is the Cal Park Hill Tunnel,
an engineering triumph that makes the
vital connection between San Rafael and
Larkspur in Marin County.
“
The tunnel has made it so much more
feasible to ride to the ferry,” says Toms.
“
It’s far more direct, and it’s so much safer
than before, when cyclists had to use the
road.”
With support from NTPP, the tun-
nel opened to cyclists and pedestrians in
December 2010, but its story began more
than a century earlier. Built in 1884 and
widened in 1924, the structure helped
railroads serving the region move freight
along the 300-mile-long corridor between
Tiburon to the south and Eureka to the
north. The tunnel cuts under Cal Park
Hill, from which it gets its name, creat-
ing a large detour circumnavigating the
mountain. After the railroads ended all
service in 1985, the tunnel sat empty.
In the late 1980s, a partial collapse at
the south end signaled the tunnel’s disin-
T
he Nonmotorized Trans­por­tation
Pilot Program (NTPP) was cre-
ated in 2005 under the federal
transportation act, SAFETEA-
LU. This program allocated $25 million
each to four communities across the U.S.
for bicycle and pedestrian infrastructure
and programs. Between 2009 and 2013
alone, the program was responsible for
averting 85.1 million vehicle miles traveled
and 34,629 tons of CO
2
emissions. The
pilot project is complete, and the commu-
nities are seeing the benefit of this invest-
ment, today and for years to come.
Cal Park Hill
Tunnel in
Marin County
SPOKES
participant
Hayat
Ahmed
seward neighborhood group
Marin County bicycle coalition