I was recently on vacation in Breckenridge, CO. I noticed that biking as a recreation was very popular. There are many roads, passes, and trails to bike on. There are many places to rent bikes as well. The thing that got me was that it was all for recreation. To me biking is a form of transportation. I just don’t understand why you want want to spend hours biking for pure exercise when you could use it as a mode of transportation around town, to and from work and running errands. But I know I am outside of the norm in this thinking.
Also while in Breckenridge I noticed that there is a very nice paved bike path (that is mostly flat) between the town of Breckenridge and Frisco. These two towns are fairly close together, about nine miles apart. I thought the idea of having a bike path to connect nearby cities was a great idea, and one that should be used more often. With paved paths connecting towns, maybe people would use bikes over other modes of transportation. It seems that sometimes biking is hard to do with safety concerns and not many designated biking paths. In Denver there are many bike paths and routes but when I lived in Manhattan, KS there was one. Yes you could still bike around town easily but there was only one road that had a designated bike path.
Like many areas of sustainability, pushing past what is normal or what you are familiar with is the hardest part. That is where we still stand on using a bike versus a car as a society. It seems to me that biking as transportation is used but it is still looked upon more in a recreational light and this is what should change. We should start thinking how to ride our bikes more often instead of using our cars because that to me is how we start developing a sustainable society.
