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HAPPY TRAILS

New avenues for geared-up bikers
By D Magazine |

Whistling past in shining black lycra shorts, reflective helmets, and fingerless gloves, they strike terror in the thumping hearts of joggers at White Rock Lake. In lanes of traffic on Garland Road they ride as if they are Oldsmo-biles, claiming equal rights to the thoroughfare. And they’re right. A 1983 Texas law defined a bike as a vehicle and gave cyclists the same rights and responsibilities as drivers of all other vehicles.

Consequently, packs of bikers, not the Hell’s Angels variety but the strong, silent type, are taking advantage of their new trafficking privileges all over Dallas, and they’re multiplying like speed bumps. This year, for the first time since 1974, national bicycle sales topped 11 million, and another 20 percent increase is expected by the end of 1986, The Bicycle Federation of America estimates that of the 78 million American bicycle riders, more than half are over sixteen years old. Twelve million of those are what the Federation calls “cyclists”; they ride once a week or more. Sales of bicycles and cycling attire at University Cycle near SMU are up at least 15 percent this year, says shop owner Bud Melton. “Used to be, I’d sell dozens of cycling shorts in a month. Now I’m selling hundreds.”

Many of the new, serious bikers are burned-out serious runners whose conversion stems from a continued awareness of the need for exercise and realistic thinking about the future of their knees and arches. Mellon says he sees increasing interest in competitive biking and in the [hick-tired all-terrain bikes, which he says are ideal commuter vehicles.

The City of Dallas has made promises to do its part to encourage cycling. The Dallas Bike Plan approval in 1985 included an intricate system of bike lanes, bike routes, and proposed bike storage facilities at selected DART stations. This month the department of transportation was to have posted bike route signs on the first seven of fifty-four east-west and north-south routes. The blue “Pegasus on wheels” signs on the first signed route, number 220, guide cyclists from Eastfield College to the University of Texas Health Science Center. The route system uses primarily residential, bicycle-friendly streets and will one day form a grid so reliable that cyclists can keep track of their directions without carrying bulky maps.

Although the city’s existing bike plan was retained in August’s tentative city budget, cyclists are keeping their fingers crossed that city council members will remember how important the plan is when the final budget is signed this month. Michael Carr, member of the Greater Dallas Bicyclists, is quick with a plug for two-wheelers: “Any time we can get people to use bicycles it raises the capacity of our existing roadways. One more cyclist means one fewer car on Central Expressway.”

Meredith Knoll, the city’s part-time bike coordinator, saw her position escape the budget ax in August, and until further notice she’s moving ahead, signing new routes and, upon request, xeroxing Mapsco pages and mailing out hand-drawn instructions on how to get from here to there on a bicycle. Maps of the entire proposed fifty-four-route system are available for $2 from the transportation department.

Other cycling news concerns the parks and recreation department’s new linear trail (“trails” are off-street passages, unlike “routes,” which travel over city streets) north of White Rock Lake to Spring Valley and Hill-crest. It remained treacherously incomplete and officially closed seven months past its scheduled March opening. But despite its broken pavement and exposed pipes, and much to the chagrin of the parks department, the trail is constantly crowded with bike and foot traffic traveling be-tween the new section of trail and the existing White Rock Lake loop that it adjoins. Using the unfinished trail may be in-convenient and dangerous, but it’s a start. Dallas cyclists have become accustomed to over-coming pedestrian obstacles.

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