Alia Anderson’s most recent accident pitched her off the bicycle she uses to travel from her home on Cherry Avenue to the Alliance for Community Choice in Transportation (ACCT) (www.transchoice.org) office on Fifth Street. A grocery bag on Anderson’s arm caught a wheel spoke, “my fork is twisted, my wheel is taco-ed—my bike is done for,” says Anderson, the executive director of ACCT.
Anderson recounts this while waiting beside her replacement ride (a purple number with a horn) by the Mellow Mushroom, the starting line for ACCT’s Corner Research Ride on February 22. Three more cyclists bring the group to five, and Anderson leads them into the 5:30pm traffic on University Avenue to look for obstacles.
 Cyclists gear up for a trek in search of safety improvements around the Corner. |
In October 2006, 130 cyclists attended ACCT’s Bike Summit and left Anderson with a list of more than 100 ideas for making the city more bike-friendly. An online survey narrowed the top 25 ideas to five goals for 2007. The list includes incentives for developers, a bike loop around the city and improvements to the 0.4 mile stretch known as the Corner.
At a stop near the intersection of University Avenue and Hospital Drive, the group discusses the “bulb out” in front of Plan 9 Records and the brick wall that funnels traffic from the 14th Street intersection into two lanes towards Rugby Road. Stephen Bach, a computer systems engineer at UVA, proposes an “island” that runs through the sidewalk that elbows its way onto University Avenue.
A bike rack lacking reflective yellow paint draws groans before a second stop at Rugby Road, where Anderson and Bach bounce ideas off each other.
A bike lane heading west through the Rugby intersection? No, it would block turning vehicles. A path next to the student walkway on UVA Grounds leading to the corner? Bach says that cyclists “will feel a lot safer biking inside that stone wall [rather] than biking right next to traffic,” and that “people do this in Holland all the time.” But UVA controls the Grounds path, not the City—and certainly not The Netherlands.
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