Hobble Creek Bicycle Association

May Meeting
This month we are going to meet on Thursday, May 28, at 7:00pm at Bartholomew Park. Ride on over and we’ll talk about biking in Springville and Mapleton. Tentative Agenda:
1. Observations about cycling while social distancing.
2. Springville – Provo corridor connections: routes and priorities.
3. Updates about the Springville bike park and active transportation committee and the Mapleton trails committee and land use plan.
4. Update about Bicycle-Friendly Community status for Springville.
5. Trail plans for Springville and Mapleton.
6. Farmer’s Market and other summer opportunities.

The League of American Bicyclists is a bicycle advocacy and education organization that dates back (with a few interruptions) to 1880.

With revenue and expenditures of around $2 million, it is one of the most influential, if not the most influential organizations of its kind. What it has become best known for over the past decade or so is its Bicycle Friendly America program, which rates businesses, universities, and communities according to their level of bicycle-friendly engineering, education, encouragement, enforcement, and evaluation and planning (the 5 E’s).

There are five different levels for Bicycle Friendly Communities: bronze, silver, gold, platinum, and diamond. Here is what the scorecard looks like:

There are currently 488 recognized Bicycle Friendly Communities, with at least one in every state. In Utah, Park City is the only community that currently has gold status, and I think anyone who has spent time bicycling in Park City would agree with such a distinction! Salt Lake City, Moab, Logan, Grand County, and Provo all have silver status (Provo is optimistic that it will be granted gold status in the upcoming application round). And Ogden, Riverdale, St. George, and Orem have bronze status. In addition, there are 31 bicycle friendly businesses in the state and three bicycle friendly universities (including nearby BYU, which has silver status).

The Hobble Creek Bicycle Association, with assistance from Springville City, recently submitted an application for Springville to be recognized as a Bicycle Friendly Community. We are shooting for bronze status with this first application, with the hopes of being able to move up to silver status in four years (cities must re-apply every four years). The application was long and detailed and took a significant amount of input from city officials to get it done, but it was very eye-opening to the kinds of things that the city and our associations could be doing to make Springville more bicycle friendly. And that is precisely the point of the program: to honor communities, of course, but also to give them ideas on how to improve.

As part of the application process, the League of American Bicyclists has asked us to distribute a survey to everyone to bikes in Springville, regardless of whether they live there or not. THIS IS WHERE YOU COME IN!! Please use the following link to access and complete the survey and tell the League what Springville is doing well and how it can improve: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/app_BFC_Sp2020 .

Thanks!!

The Springville Buildings and Grounds department and Parks Committee have begun discussions about a potential mountain bike skills park at a piece of city property near the mouth of Spring Creek Canyon. Here are the approximate boundaries of the property in question:

As you can see it’s a pretty big piece of ground that until recently was slated to become a normal park with grass and a few trees and playground. We certainly agree that it would be much better as a mountain bike skills park, particularly with its proximity to the Bonneville Shoreline Trail!

What we would like to do as an Association is help to plan the park. We will be meeting on Saturday, December 14, at 10:00, at the property to scope it out and start putting pen to paper. Below you can see a few pictures of the property–as you can see most of it is pretty flat, but the hill leading up to 2080 E is quite steep.

For some ideas of the kinds of features we might want to include in the mountain bike park, here are links to a couple of local parks that are popular: the Draper Bike Park, and the Mountain Ranch Bike Park in Eagle Mountain. So check them out, come to our meeting, and let us know what you want to see here in Springville!

I recently posed four questions to the six candidates for the city council. I have received answers now from four of them. Here are the questions followed by the answers:

Continue reading “City Council Candidates on Active Transportation”

On Saturday, 21 September 2019, the Hobble Creek Bicycle Association will host a maintenance and repair clinic led by our bike repair specialist, Griffin Park. The event will be held from 11:00 to 12:00 at the Civic Center Park (east of the splash pad). Come learn about how to keep your bike clean, lubed, and ready to ride as we head into the Fall season!

At our August meeting we listened to a presentation by Aaron Skabelund, one of the pioneers of bicycle advocacy in Provo, who talked about Bicycle-Friendly Communities. This is a designation awarded by the League of American Bicyclists, the country’s oldest and best-known bicycle advocacy organization, to communities who are making concerted efforts to improve cycling. The award has several levels, from honorable mention to platinum, and a few cities in our county have recently been recognized. Provo earned Silver status on their second application after four years at the Bronze level, Orem is now at the Bronze level, and Vineyard received an honorable mention. You can learn more about this award at their website.

We decided at the August meeting to complete the application for Springville, working toward a deadline of February 5, 2020. There are five parts to the application and we have divided the different sections up among those who were in attendance at the meeting to perform an initial assessment and see what types of data we will need to gather from the city and what we can do as an association between now and February to improve our chances of receiving Bronze status (which is probably the highest level we can hope for at this point). Our next meeting to talk about this will be SEPTEMBER 12 at 7:00 at the Snelson PhotoColor Lab. We will also at that meeting be talking about plans to expand the activities of the Hobble Creek Bicycle Association. We hope to see many of you there!

I hope everyone is enjoying their summer and finding time to ride. The weather has been beautiful and I’ve noticed lots of people in Springville and Mapleton riding around town on a wide assortment of bikes–e-bikes, road bikes, mountain bikes, kids’ bikes, bikes with trailers, etc. The more of us there are, the safer we will all be, so keep riding!

This month’s meeting is going to be held on July 30 at 6:30pm. We will meet as a group at the Hobble Creek Trail trailhead park at the intersection of 1700E and Canyon Road. This is a small green space with parking for both cars and bikes, picnic tables, and a bicycle maintenance station. We will then be taken on a guided tour by one of our members, Kurtt Boucher, who a few days ago gave the Springville city council a presentation of his plan to connect the eastside Hobble Creek Trail (which ends at the trailhead where we are meeting) to the westside Hobble Creek Trail. We’ll have a chance to ride his proposed route and provide feedback on how it might be improved. Don’t miss this chance to meet new people and ride through the city as a group!

Next, I’d like to give a big shout out to Springville resident and hopefully soon-to-be member of the Hobble Creek Bicycle Association, Griffin Park. Griffin is the owner/operator of Jolly Circle, a mobile bicycle-repair company. He is an expert bike mechanic who can fix your bikes at his place or yours, and he charges very reasonable rates. Yesterday and today he fixed up two of my bikes–a cruiser and a mountain bike–and I’m very satisfied with the whole experience.

Last thought of the day: I just read a nice summary of arguments made by people who oppose bicycle infrastructure and rebuttals to those arguments. The immediate context for the article is the UK, but I think the principles are universal. Check it out and see what you think!

The past week or so (minus a few days floating down the Green River) I’ve been working on a bike map for Springville, which you can now find on this website. It’s still preliminary because I know there are a number of bike racks that I have missed, but I wanted to share a few initial impressions from riding around town.

Continue reading “Bike Parking!”

Thanks to all who participated in the annual Bike with the Mayor event on May 18! This is always a great community-building event built around cycling. Community members of all ages showed up. It is great to live in a city that is so supportive of cycling and quality of life.

Last week I went to the Museum of Science in London and found a couple of old bicycles on display. The first ones here are from 1867 (the larger one in the back–called the “boneshaker” or “pennyfarthing”) and 1871 (the smaller one in front). Note that both of them have the pedals attached directly to the front hub and imagine what that must have been like.

Now check out this next one, built in 1885 and called the “safety bicycle.” It was lower to the ground and used a chain to drive the rear wheel, which turned out to be a much safer combination. You’ll see that the basic geometry of the standard bicycle hasn’t really changed in 135 years. Now that’s what I call some solid engineering!

You can read more about the history of the bicycle in this article.

There sure are lots of cyclists here in London! Traffic is often congested, and so those on 2 wheels often go much faster than those on 4. There are several bike share programs in town and lots of bike-and-pedestrian infrastructure to help protect those who don’t enjoy thousands of pounds of steel around them. But most of all what I’ve noticed is a culture of driving with respect for bicyclists and pedestrians. I’m sure there are exceptions, but I think because there are so many more cyclists here people have gotten used to them and have learned to live with them on the roads. (And of course many motorists are themselves cyclists.) In Springville and throughout Utah we will benefit as cyclists when there are more bikes on the road. So let’s choose the bike rather than the car and encourage others to do likewise. Here’s a parting shot–look at all the bikes being stored in covered parking in the Marylebone train station!