New Orleans designated a bronze level “Bike Friendly City”

08 Nov 2011

Thanks to millions in disaster aid from the federal government, many miles of roads have been improved since 2005. The city footed the bill for adding bike lanes to the repaired roads, quadrupling its bike-lane mileage from 11 miles in 2005 to 44 miles today, with an additional 15 miles planned.
Studies conducted by Kathryn Parker of Tulane University’s Prevention Research Center show that ridership along St. Claude Avenue increased by 57 percent after bike lanes were added in 2008. On South Carrollton Avenue, the number of cyclists jumped a whopping 225 percent after bike lanes were striped in 2010.

“There is an increasing appreciation nationwide of a simpler lifestyle involving biking and walking,” Campanella said. “There’s a rising interest, especially among young people, in sustainability and concern about global warming. And there is also a recession and high gas prices.”
In New Orleans, 18 percent of households in the city don’t own a car, a statistic partly responsible for fact that New Orleans ranks sixth among like-sized cities in the percentage of workers who commute to work by bike, according to the 2010 U.S. Census Bureau’s 2009 American Community Survey.
Bart Everson, who has been commuting to work by bike for eleven years, said he started doing it to save money, but soon became hooked by the “sheer pleasure” biking brings.
“I carry a camera with me and I stop to take photos of interesting things, things I would never see or be able to appreciate in a car, much less be able to stop for,” he said.
Everson is a major force behind the effort to create a 3.1-mile bike path along the derelict Lafitte Corridor, which will connect the French Quarter to Canal Boulevard, linking seven neighborhoods along the way.
Whether cyclists are spurred by economics, philosophy, health goals, pleasure or frustration, they now have a bounty of resources available to them that didn’t exist a few years ago.

Why not go for a ride? Click here to read the original article.