By SPRING ESELGROTH
Cronkite News Service
PRESCOTT – On a Friday afternoon, Erika DeLeo is taking apart an old bike, scrubbing the rusty chain and oiling the ball bearings and thinking about how it’s going to go back together.
She could be any other student working at the HUB, the do-it-yourself bicycle shop at Prescott College, but actually she’s in class.
DeLeo is one of nearly a dozen students enrolled in The Bicycle: Vehicle for Social Change, a class that teaches social change on the most personal level: by refurbishing old bikes for people in need of transportation.
“Originally, I was interested in this class to learn about the mechanics of bicycles,” DeLeo said. “Then I discovered that half of the class was about social change, and I thought that would be something I would definitely be in to.”
Sue Knaup, founder of the international bicycle advocacy organization OneStreet and the class instructor, has changed the course over the past two years from being primarily about safe biking practices and bicycle repair into a course with a strong lesson about the power individuals have to create a positive change in their communities and the world.
This month, as part of that lesson, Knaup and a handful of students will travel to Amsterdam and Seville, Spain, two cities that have embraced bicycling and demonstrated their support through campaigns and citywide policy changes.
“It’s important that students learn safe bicycling practices, how to repair bikes and help other to bike more safely,” Knaup said. “But I also want students to learn the science of social change through advocating bicycling and why bicycles can be a vehicle social change.”
The group will spend two days in Amsterdam, where they will meet with Fietsersbond, the local bicycling advocacy organization for The Netherlands, as well as policy makers who will share some of the steps they’ve taken over the last several decades to transform the city’s transportation system.
Currently, according to Knaup, Amsterdam is one of the world’s top bicycling cities with roughly 50 percent of all trips made by bicycle.
“I want the students to go to Amsterdam to see what a city with healthy transportation options looks like,” Knaup said. “And I want them to experience what it’s like to ride in that swarm of bikes.”
The group then will travel to Seville for the annual Velo City Conference, an international gathering, where they will meet with bicycling advocates from around the world and learn how they’ve approached bicycling in their cities and nations.
Seville was chosen to host the 2011 conference in part because of the changes it has made in increasing its bicycling footprint over the last three years.
“Seville is a great example for Prescott, because we can see the steps they took to create the most extraordinary leap from less than 1 percent of trips made on bike to 6 percent,” Knaup said. “Amsterdam seems like an impossible goal, but Seville is encouraging because we can see how the change happened.”
Taylor Kuyk-White, a Prescott College senior going on the trip, said she was drawn to the course because bicycling has been her main source of transportation. She said the opportunity to see bicycle-friendly Amsterdam is exciting.
“I’ve never lived in a place that’s been bicycle friendly at all, so I’m really excited to experience that,” Kuyk-White said. “Just the experience of it will be a great motivational tool for implementing change here in Prescott.”
Kuyk-White said the Velo City Conference is the ideal opportunity to be exposed to a broad array of perspectives and tactics that have been used successfully to unite communities.
“This trip is about scoping out methods that people who have experience using the bicycle as a tool for change approach their communities and how to make policy changes,” Kuyk-White said.
Knaup said Prescott has a long way to go before it’s a bicycle-friendly city, complete with sidewalks that connect and bicycle lanes, as well as other forms of public transportation. But Knaup says it’s certainly not impossible.
“My dream for Prescott is that it finally becomes a healthy city were every citizen has the opportunity to choose bicycling or to just go for a stroll without fearing for their lives,” Knaup said. “I hope that’s not too much to ask.”
For Erika DeLeo, it’s no one’s fault that Prescott doesn’t have healthier forms of transportation, but that doesn’t change the fact that changes need to be made to make sure everyone can be safe on the road and have access to transportation.
“I’m not angry with drivers or how unsafe the roads are, but I would love to see Prescott turn into a city like Copenhagen or Amsterdam and become much more bicycle friendly,” she said.
Bike-friendly cities:
– Amsterdam, The Netherlands: With roughly half of all trips made on bicycles, it’s often called “The Bike Capital of the World.”
– Portland, Ore.: The city has managed to quadruple its bicycle use over the last 20 years by building extensive bike lanes that run throughout the city.
– Copenhagen, Denmark: In 2010, 32 percent of commuters bicycled to work.
– Boulder, Colo.: The city has has designated 15 percent of its transportation budget to improving bicycle traffic and safety since 2005.
– Davis, Calif.: Seventeen percent of this city’s residents commute to work on a bike.
Source: Virgin Vacations
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