Rosemary Cheramie
October 25, 2016
Used car dealers say local market remains steady
October 25, 2016
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 it up 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 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 lane. 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.
