Speaking of Mayors truly setting a high bar for quality and achievement

"As the city and its consultant, Chicagoland Bicycle Federation, began researching the plan three years ago, the mayor encouraged them to seek inspiration across the globe."

The 2005 line-up for Mayor Daley’s Bicycling Ambassadors hit the streets last month,beginning their six-month odyssey of enlightening Chicagoans about bike transportation, safety and road-sharing. Photo from Bike Traffic.

The Sunday Chicago Tribune reports on Chicago's ambitious bicycling promotion master plan in the article "CHICAGO'S MASTER PLAN: DON'T DRIVE. JUST BIKE. City peddling new proposal for 500-mile network of paths to be finished by 2015." From the article:

...the city's Department of Transportation is bent on getting people to bike to work, to school, to stores and to mass transit stops, cobbling together a 500-mile network of designated routes.

Understanding that bicyclists' greatest enemies--aside from sloth--are car doors, right-lane passers and other street perils, planners looked around the world for new safety ideas. From Geneva, Switzerland, they got the idea of raised bike lanes, a layer of pavement above street level and below the curb that would help dissuade motorists from veering into cycling territory. By 2010, the city hopes to experiment with raised lanes in a few locations. In Copenhagen, Cambridge and other places, planners saw bicycle lanes colored a startling shade of teal green, thermoplastic markings they hope to duplicate at some Chicago intersections to try to warn right-turning cars to watch for bikes....

The plan does not say where the new miles of bike lanes and improvements would be located. But, with a strong track record of delivering for cyclists, the city is thinking big: a bike route within a half-mile of every resident; a 50-mile circuit of bike trails, with some off-road paths to be announced later this year; 185 miles of new bikeways altogether.

By 2015, planners hope, 5 percent of all trips shorter than 5 miles long will be made by bike. "It's truly putting Chicago on the forefront of improving cycling across the country," said Andy Clarke, executive director of the Washington D.C.-based League of American Bicyclists, adding that unlike most cities where bike plans are shelved, they frequently are implemented in Chicago, with the backing of Mayor Richard Daley, an avid biker.

The Chicagoland Bicycling Federation and the City of Chicago sponsor a "Bike the (Lakeshore) Drive" ride attracting as many as 20,000 riders in fundraising for bicycling promotion. Group riding towards the Field Museum, photo by ASI Photo.

Of course, just because you bicycle, it doesn't mean, necessarily, that it influences your policy choices.

President George W. Bush (R) and Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen of Denmark navigate a path at Camp David, Maryland. White House photo, from the article "Diplomacy on Two Wheels" in the Washington Post. "He's very fast," Anders Fogh Rasmussen observed afterward. "I consider myself a skilled mountain biker, but it was challenging."

Index Keywords: mobility; bicycling