Category: bicycling

Our bi-monthly road rides continue this Saturday–12:15pm at the main entrance to Springville High School. The weather is going to be beautiful and Mike Snelson has a nice route picked out for us. Let’s get out and have a fun ride!

Come join our second road ride of the year, March 20. We are meeting at 10:00am at the front entrance to Springville High School and will ride about 24 miles through Springville, Mapleton, and Spanish Fork. On our first ride we had a good groups of six riders and would love to have a few more join us. Come out and make some new bike friends!

Next Saturday March 6th is the Hobble Creek Bicycle Association’s first group ride of the season. We will be doing a group ride every other Saturday on the 1st and 3rd Saturdays of each month March through October. Start times will vary depending on the route and the weather but they will be announced along with the routes. We will start easy and short and build up to longer rides as the season progresses with short rides interspersed.

The ride routes will be posted here on HCBA Facebook page a week prior to the ride as well as the day before the ride. Likewise the rides will be posted on HCBA’s Strava Club page and on the HCBA website. If you’re not a member of the HCBA Strava Club join now!

We invite all to join in on our rides. All rides will begin at the front doors of Springville High School. Riders are encouraged to meet there and plan on riding with the group. However, there are no restrictions on these rides. We understand riders are at differing levels of ability. You can join the ride anytime, anywhere along the planned route, you can ride at your own pace, you can drop out of the ride anytime. Our intention is to make these rides social, fun and challenging.

If anyone has suggestions for routes please send them to stonefacemike@gmail.com. Eight of the 16 routes have been created. The other eight will follow soon but we’re happy to accept suggestions for your favorite routes. The route suggestions need to be a minimum of 15 miles.

The ride on March 6th will begin at the front doors of SHS at 11:00am. It will be a 16 mile easy ride to the end of the Mapleton Lateral Trail and back. Much of the ride will be on roads in addition to the trail itself. It appears from the weather forcast that the temps will be in the mid to high 50s. Here is the link to the route map:https://www.mapmyride.com/routes/view/4067781283

This morning four members of the Hobble Creek Bicycle Association left the Springville Civic Center at just after 7:30am and embarked on a 40+-mile ride through Mapleton, Spanish Fork, Salem, Payson, Benjamin, and back to Springville. It was a beautiful clear morning with generally light traffic on the road.

A few interesting observations and lessons:

1. No flat tires and only one thrown chain means we were able to keep riding pretty well.
2. Lots of other people out riding too, which creates a good sense of community (as long as they wave–people, wave at other cyclists!)
3. We met a guy from Spanish Fork who was riding his bike to Sandy and back to deliver some sourdough bread as part of a charity project. He had a long ways to go when we saw him!
4. I noticed some cool birds (Mountain Bluebird, Lewis’s Woodpecker, Western Meadowlark, etc.) along the way. Biking brings you closer to nature.
5. Only one jerk yelled at us the whole time. She must have been having a bad morning since we didn’t even slow her down as she passed us in her truck.
6. For rides of more than 30 miles bring food. Trust me.
7. Grease your chain before you go.
8. Riding in a paceline rocks. This is why you should ride with friends.

We have been asked to help out some fellow Springvillains with some goathead removal. There is a nice multiuse trail that starts at 950 West 1325 South and winds through a newish neighborhood before joinining the 1200 West trail, but unfortunately there are goathead weeds growing on both sides resulting in multiple popped tubes. So come join us with your trowels, weed tools, shovels, buckets, garbage bags, gloves this Saturday (the 8th) at 9:00am! We’ll meet up with some local residents and fight back against those nasty thorns! Hope to see you there!

Tonight, July 27th, will be the fourth weekly repair clinic and slow roll. They’ve been a success so far, with dozens of people participating over the last three weeks. Griffin has taught some valuable skills about how to get our shifting to where it should be and the rides have been really pleasant. It’s great to have a large group of cyclists to create a sense of community and to make vehicles more aware of our presence on the roads. We’ll be holding these at Jolly Circle for at least the rest of the summer!

I’ve been wanting to do a goathead removal service project ever since we started this association back in 2018 so was thrilled when Michael Wood recently proposed a specific section of 800 South that needed some love. My wife and kids actually had a bad experience with that area a few years ago–all their tubes got popped, basically. So on Wednesday, July 8, we met at 7 with our weed tools and shovels and started digging them up by their roots. This section of road is about 3 blocks long and has unkept fields on both sides of the road, which means lots of goatheads! The propert owners of one section actually stopped by in their UTV with Snickers ice cream bars to thank us. They were quite nice and told us that most of the area will soon be sold by other family members to developers. That will certainly be good for us cyclists if houses do go into that area! In all we filled a couple of buckets quite full and look forward now to riding there this summer without worrying about flat tires!

This summer, every Monday night, we will be meeting at Jolly Circle Bicycle Repair to have a short repair clinic and then do a “Slow Roll” ride around Springville. The clinics will be taught by Griffin Park, local bike racer and owner of Jolly Circle.

The idea of the Slow Roll came about in Detroit with the basic idea of bringing community members together every Monday evening to ride through town. Each week follows a different route, showing off the city to a diverse group of people, and giving people confidence by riding in large groups. This basic format has been copied in many other cities and we are now bringing it to Springville. So spread the word and I hope to see growing numbers of people out riding together every Monday evening!

The League of American Bicyclists recently completed their evaluation of our application for Bicycle Friendly Community and awarded Springville an Honorable Mention. The scorecard suggests that Springville is close to a Bronze designation and provides a number of things that can be done to reach that level. Here are a few that I think can be accomplished over the next couple of years, at which point we can apply again.

1. Adopt a Complete Streets policy. This basically means that whenever a street is developed or redone, planners have to properly account for all users, not just vehicles. Also adopt a NACTO design manual to help accomplish this. These things would need city council support.
2. Expand and improve the trail and bike lane network, including by creating more grade-separated facilities. This is being done, with the addition of bike lanes, buffered bike lanes, and the elimination of some on-street parking on Center Street, Main Street south of 400S, and 1700E since the beginning of this year (and since we submitted our application).
3. Install wayfairing signs. Wayfairing signs have recently gone up on the Mapleton Lateral Canal Trail, and Springville could definitely use some on the Hobble Creek Trail as well as on Center St. and Main St.
4. Increase bicycle parking around the community. We have already created a parking map. Now we need to fill in the gaps like how Provo has recently installed a bunch of racks downtown and at parks.
5. Improve bicycle education in schools and through events like Bike to Work Week and Bike to School Day. This is definitely something we need to do better on–hopefully Covid-19 doesn’t interfere with these plans next year!
6. Improve relations with law enforcement and encourage the creation of bike patrols. I have talked with Chief Martinez about this and he would like to puchase bike and do this. Follow up is needed.
7. Update the bicycle master plan and secure dedicated funding for its implementation. The Active Transportation Ad Hoc Committee just had its first meeting and is working toward this update. Support from the city council will be needed to secure dedicated funding from the transportation budget.
8. Work on multiple ways of counting bicycle trips, including with automated bicycle counters. We will have to see if there is funding available for this at the city level. In the meantime, we can continue to do school counts and maybe do some trail counts in the summer as well.

So, lots of good things to work on over the next couple of years! And one of the biggest things, of course, is to ride more and encourage others to ride more. We have strength in numbers!

Summer is almost here, the riding weather has been beautiful, and it’s time to celebrate the creation of new bike lanes in Springville and Mapleton!

First, the Center Street construction project is just about wrapped up and today they placed markers for lane lines. The big news is that in addition to adding bike lanes between Main St and 100 East that our association successfully lobbied for, we now have buffered bike lanes from Main St to 400 East. And they even go all the way to Main St on the north side of the street, as you can kind of see in the second picture (pardon the glare).

Looking West from about 50 East.

The next project nearing completion is 1700 East in Springville, which our association also successfully lobbied for last year. The road is now repaved and the city has installed ‘No Parking’ signs along the entire west side of the road. This will allow for bike lanes on both sides of the street while maintaining vehicle parking on the east side of the road (where there are a few residences). Hopefully we’ll see those lanes painted soon!

Finally, the repaving of Hwy-89 from about 600 South in Springville (including the crazy flyover intersection) to 1200 North in Mapleton is done and there is now an official bike lane on both sides of the road. Not all the paint is down yet, but it is in a few places, including some nice sharrows in right-turn lanes. This should eventually be extended all the way through Mapleton.