street smarts Making a path for cyclists could bring our neighborhoods closer together

Thehipster

Name: Max Rasor

Age: 23

Occupation: Mechanic at Oak Cliff Bicycle Co. and sales associate at Urban Outfitters

Neighborhood: Winnetka Heights

Bike: Leader 725 steel track frame with a carbon fork

Rasor doesn’t have a car, so he rides his bike or takes DART everywhere he goes. A graduate of Booker T. Washington High School for the Visual and Performing Arts, he started working on bikes when he was 18. Soon, he amassed a hefty bike collection. Besides the red, white and blue fixedgear he rides every day (“It matches all of my clothing and most of my hats,” he says), he owns five other bikes, plus enough parts to build two or three more. One of the five is exclusively for bike polo, which Rasor plays with a group at Norbuck Park every Tuesday and Thursday. Rasor sports a punk-rock haircut and, sometimes, a handlebar moustache. We warned him we were planning to label him a “hipster,” because he’s young and trendy. “That’s fine,” he says. “I’ll take that.”

Anew saying in Oak Cliff goes that when people buy or rent places in our neighborhood for the first time, they are required to purchase a bicycle within the first 90 days of residency.

Everywhere you look in Oak Cliff, there’s two-wheeled transit. We’re the home of Bike Friendly Oak Cliff, the advocacy group that has spawned similar organizations in other Dallas neighborhoods. Thanks to BFOC and the many pedal pushers in our neighborhood, Oak Cliff is the bicyclingest place in all of Dallas.

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But perhaps that isn’t saying much, since Dallas is considered one of the most dangerous places for cyclists. The editors of Bicycling Magazine in 2009 named Dallas the worst city in the Unites States for bicycling. They call us a sprawling, car-centric city with enormous arterial roads jammed with impatient hostile drivers in huge vehicles.

A recent comprehensive study by the Alliance for Biking and Walking ranked Dallas 49 out of 51 major cities for its percentage of residents who cycle to work. We rank 40 out of 51 when it comes to safety for cyclists, based on documented accidents and fatalities.

The same study, however, notes that Dallas’ plan to construct more than 1,000 bike-lane miles over the next 10 years is among the most ambitious in the nation.

One problem, though: The Dallas Bike Plan is not explicitly funded in the 2012-13 city budget, and it is expected to cost about $16 million to implement over 10 years.

The plan aims to improve driver and cyclist safety, advance public health and fitness, and clean up the air. It’s also about changing the culture of our city to one in which drivers don’t fantasize about running down cyclists for holding them up a few minutes on the road.

Oak Cliff cyclists are familiar with the hostilities of motorists. Take Dallas Torres, the 32-year-old bike builder who was injured on the Jefferson Viaduct in January. Torres suffered three broken vertebrae in his neck after a distracted driver hit him from behind. It was a terrible accident, but it wasn’t singular. Close calls and openly hostile drivers are common, Torres says.

“Cars get too close,” he says. “You don’t have to scare me. You’re in a car. You’re going to win every time.”

Torres says he wants to move out of Dallas to a more bikeable city. But others have hope for a bike-friendly Dallas.

City council member Delia Jasso says she became convinced our neighborhood could become bike and pedestrian friendly after the first Better Block project on Tyler Street in 2010.

“I was born and raised in Dallas, so I was not a bicycle rider,” Jasso says. “I

The commuTer

Name: Scott Yockel

Age: 34

Occupation: Manager of high performance computing at The University of North Texas

Neighborhood: L.O. Daniel

Bike: Giant Defy 2 with fenders, a rack and two waterproof panniers

Scott Yockel’s workday begins long before he arrives at his office in Denton. It typically starts once he’s on the first of two trains he rides every workday. “I answer emails, or I have time to read on the train,” he says. “I also get my exercise to and from work, so I don’t have to go to the gym.” Yockel rides his bike a little over five miles from Oak Cliff to Downtown, where he hops onto the Green Line. Then he transfers to the new Denton County Transit Authority A Train into downtown Denton, where he rides his bike two miles to the UNT campus. Altogether, it’s about 15 miles on the bike and an hour and 45 minutes each way. Why not just drive to Denton? “Driving is kind of annoying,” Yockel says. “It puts you in a bad mood. There are times, especially on Fridays, when it could take two hours to drive from Denton to Oak Cliff.” Yockel and his wife moved to Dallas from Chicago a few years ago, and he decided he didn’t want to return to commuting by car. For one thing, he has a Ph.D. in chemistry, and he’s calculated how much pollution that would contribute. Plus, riding a bike is more fun, he says. Commuting without a car in Dallas has its drawbacks, however. If he misses the second train, for example, he’s missed it for the day. Yockel has been forced to work from home a few times when that happened. Also, he won’t ride his bike in a downpour, not so much because he doesn’t like rain, but because it’s too dangerous. Once, in the rain, he hit a car in Denton, going about 10 miles per hour, when it pulled out in front of him. He wasn’t injured, and the motorist gave him a ride home, but Yockel doesn’t like to ride in the rain any more. The most dangerous part of his route, he says, is crossing the Jefferson Viaduct, where the speed limit is 45 miles per hour. He stays in the left-hand lane all the way from Zang to the Green Line stop on Market. “They still whiz by at 50 miles per hour, but I find it to be safest in the left lane,” he says.

ride like The pros

Cycling Savvy DFW offers a three-part course at Northway Church, teaching the principles of riding in traffic. It begins with a classroom discussion followed by bicycle training in the parking lot. Finally, cyclists put their skills to the test on a tour of the city.

The program started in Orlando, and the curriculum comes from the Florida Bicycle Association. Instructors Richard Wharton, Waco Moore and Eliot Landrum show students how to cycle safely on any road in Dallas without using sidewalks or hugging the right curb. “You lead the dance,” Wharton says. “A driver is a driver whether it’s on two wheels or four.”

The next programs are March 2-3 and April 27-28. The cost is $75. For more information, visit cyclingsavvy.org and click on the Dallas chapter.