Cycling growing for adults, but not for children

A crowd of about 50 people, each with their own set of wheels, gathered on Goode Street next to the Terrebonne Parish Courthouse on Thursday night.

Folks greeted familiar faces as bumping music pulsed through the street and neon lit up the gathering. The music was to keep the mood vibrant; the neon was for safety.

The sets of wheels were bicycles on this night, and the neon was attached to the tires of each festive member of the group. Everyone was there for a brisk, six-mile ride around Houma as part of Houma Bike Night, hosted by local deejay Will Boykin and organized by Ryan Charles. The ride was both a social event for community fun as well as a chance to let the biking bug bite a few more people in Houma. Indeed, the night featured bikers of all age groups and skill levels, with some decked-out road bikes riding next to revamped cruisers, all in the name of a good time.

Before the event, Charles said he hoped the event would be another step in the burgeoning biking culture in Houma. It’s one that follows a nationwide trend of more adults turning to biking, both serious and casual, as a healthy hobby which can also function as a mode of transportation. However, it’s also a hobby that’s has to grow in the face of limited local biking infrastructure and a reeling economy.

Charles himself is a relatively recent convert to biking, having picked up the hobby about three years ago. He said he was looking for a way to get some cardio workout in, but he “hates running.”

“I’m pretty heavy, so until I get down in weight, throwing all this weight around on the joints is not good,” Charles said.

Charles said he picked up a $200 bike and rode that for about five months. Eventually, a friend in Baton Rouge asked him to join a group ride, but Charles knew his bike was not up to snuff. They had real, honest-to-goodness road bikes. While getting his bike fixed by Rod Russell at BG Bicycles on West Park Avenue, Russell’s salesmanship convinced him to upgrade to a used road bike, a move Charles compared to “going from a 1973 [Ford] Pinto to a 2015 [Nissan] Maxima.”

Two-and-a-half years and multiple bikes later, Charles was at BG again, one of the Houma native’s frequent haunts when he is not working offshore. Now firmly entrenched in the hobby, this time he was picking up some energy gels and foods to ingest as he bikes on longer trips. Russell, who has owned and operated BG for six years, said he has definitely seen local biking culture grow over his time in business. Russell said many of the new faces he’s seen in his shop have turned to biking for health benefits in the same way Charles once did. While the stagnant local economy has made the road a bit rougher for his company, Russell said that emphasis on health has kept his business afloat in these trying times.

“When it’s your health, people aren’t really going to cut back on that. They’re going to find somewhere else to save before they go to their health,” Russell said.

However, there are structural limits to how much biking can grow in an area like Houma, where biking infrastructure is on short supply. Russell lamented how there are no dedicated bike lanes on the roads in the parish, making bike riding around Terrebonne a risky endeavor of bikes sharing space with automobiles.

Cindi Bowen at Bayou City Bicycles on Bayou Gardens Boulevard shares Russell’s sentiment. Bowen has been working since she was five years old at her father Manuel Hargraves’s store, which has been in business since 1985. Bowen, who was putting bikes together for the business as a kindergartener, said the lack of infrastructure for cyclists has put a cap on biking’s growth in the area. She noted the pathway on the Westside Boulevard Extension between West Park and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard has to pull double duty as a sidewalk and bike lang. The off-road, on-road bike path on Valhi Boulevard is only a road meant for cars marked by signs announcing it as a bike path, with no actual lane dedicated to bicycles.

“There is one from Cannata’s to Martin Luther King, but it’s a sidewalk, pretty much. There’s one on Valhi as well, but it’s such a high traffic area that no one wants to ride on it,” Bowen said.

Terrebonne Parish Planning and Zoning Director Chris Pulaski said the Valhi bike path demarcation serves two purposes: it lets bikers, especially those from out of town, know where the biking areas are, and it also puts auto drivers be on alert that cyclists could be around. He said the parish has been awarded a grant to extend the Valhi route to include the Westside Extension, Southdown Mandalay Road.

Pulaski said the his department wants to push more projects in line with the Louisiana Department of Transporation and Development’s Complete Streets Policy, which has a number of criteria, including bike lanes, for new roadway projects. Such projects could open up new federal and state funding sources for said projects. However, with parish tax revenues decreasing in light of the weakened local economy, Terrebonne has limited resources to pursue such projects with added costs.

Pulaski said the planning benefits that come with adding bike lanes change depending on the area. In a more urban setting, bike lanes could ease traffic congestion for everyone by encouraging more commuter cyclists, taking cars off the street. While Terrebonne Parish has few commuter cyclists at the moment, according to Pulaski, additional biking paths and lanes do bring major quality of life benefits to the parish.

“As a parent of a five-year-old, when he rides his bike, we’re going to a park or some place like that. It’d be nice if we had a set of trails where your kids could go and ride safely,” Pulaski said.

While evolving technology has improved the experience for serious, health-conscious bikers, it may also provide a challenge for its future growth. For those such as Quan Steward, who started biking about two months ago at the behest of Charles, those tools have come in handy. Steward, who got on the saddle in his own effort to shed some pounds, has a GPS device to track his distance and speed as well as a monitor tracking his heart rate to let him know when he is overstressing his body as he rides.

“It’s important to know when you’re up at that high level as you ride. When it gets up there, you know you’ve got to fall back and take it easy for a little while,” Steward said.

However, Bowen said the advent of technology, along with uncertainty regarding the economy and this year’s election, have also harmed her store’s sale numbers. She said her store has made up for less outright bike sales with more repairs and restorations. According to Bowen, sales are down among children, who now have new attractions diverting their attention from bicycles.

“Social media. More kids are on cell phones and computers and video games and just not interested in riding bikes,” Bowen said.

Charles said he wishes Terrebonne Parish had more biking infrastructure, but he’s seen a great improvement already. He travels around Louisiana, hitting different trails with friends and making new ones along the way. He noted how rides may feature many different teams, but any notion of cliques quickly disintegrates in the face of biking’s familial effects. Whenever he travels, his bike flies with him, and he’s ridden the streets of both Rio de Janeiro and and New York.

“When you complete a ride it’s a feeling of accomplishment,” Charles said. “Whether it’s five miles or 1,000 miles, it’s like, ‘I did something.’ Because it’s all you. Nobody’s out there. If you stop pedaling, you stop.”

Cycling