Clearly, Dallas, You Want to Ride Your Bike. And You Want to Ride It Where You Like.

The drums are sounding in the night. Lot of action here last week on the biko front, indicating pent-up interest and a growing constituency. One commenter claimed that only 8 percent of Portland residents are regular cyclists but the entire city council is made up of bikos. I think his...

By Jim Schutze

July 26, 2010

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The drums are sounding in the night.

Lot of action here last week on the biko front, indicating pent-up interest and a growing constituency. One commenter claimed that only 8 percent of Portland residents are regular cyclists but the entire city council is made up of bikos. I think his point was that bikicism, in his view, is tantamount to civic virtue.

I couldn't devote the day to it, but the best figure I could find for Portland residents who now ride bikes every day was 6.4 percent. I didn't see anything on the percentage of the Portland council who are Biko-American (didn't look hard), but Portland is about to embark on the nation's most ambitious bicycle plan with a goal of increasing ridership by 400 percent. I guess it's safe to say the council there is not anti-biko. As for our the new-and-improved Dallas Bike Plan, we're still waiting on the "full Web site" we were promised two months ago.

The only real biko we have on our city council is Angela Hunt. Before she took time off to have a kid, Hunt was actively investigating things other cities have done to promote bikological environments.

Here is a really interesting update on developments in the larger bikosphere. Bike boxes for everyone.

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Jim Schutze has been the city columnist for the Dallas Observer since 1998. He has been a recipient of the Association of Alternative Newsweeklies’ national award for best commentary and Lincoln University’s national Unity Award for writing on civil rights and racial issues. In 2011 he was admitted to the Texas Institute of Letters.

Contact: Jim Schutze