A bicycling mayor
On August 25, Donovan Slack reported in the Globe:
Now, the mayor has discovered bicycling.
Menino purchased a silver Trek road bike [the photo shows a Lime cruiser] three weeks ago and has been riding it regularly through his Hyde Park neighborhood. Each weekday at about 5 a.m., the 64-year-old mayor straps on a black cycling helmet and an arm band with red reflector lights and sets off alone on a leisurely, 45-minute pedal. He acknowledges that another public crusade is brewing.
“We’re going to do more in our city with bikes,” Menino decreed upon his return home from a ride yesterday…
“When I get more experienced at this, I’ll be able to ride the whole city,” he said, visibly excited during an interview in the kitchen of his Chesterfield Street home.
Not even a month later, Matt Viser reports…
A newly converted cyclist himself, Menino will announce today the hiring of a bike czar, former Olympic cyclist Nicole Freedman, and a first phase of improvements to include 250 new bike racks across Boston and an online map system. In the next several years, Menino said, he plans to create a network of bike lanes… Paths could also be constructed to connect the Emerald Necklace system of parks, and the mayor is looking at facilities like showers, bike storage areas, and automated bike rental systems that make wheels instantly available to anyone with a credit card.
That was fast. (The photo of Menino on his Lime should go on the cover of Trek’s new 1 World 2 Wheels advocacy materials.) Even compares favorably with San Francisco, where the mayor and seven of eleven supervisors rode in Bike to Work Day this year — where, at the peak of rush hour, inbound traffic on Market Street was 54% bikes, 42% cars, and 4% taxi, bus, or tram.
