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June 10, 2010

Biking to work buys you breakfast

June 18

Bicycle commuters will be treated to breakfast June 18 courtesy of Pitt’s Parking, Transportation and Services (PT&S) office. Event tables will be set up from 7:30 to 10 a.m. on the Fifth Avenue side of the William Pitt Union.

The breakfast is part of bicycle advocacy group BikePGH’s monthly Car Free Fridays program. Bikers will need to show their helmet to receive breakfast, but all car-free commuters can register as Car Free Friday participants, pick up a discount card good at local businesses and enter a raffle for a prize package from program sponsors.

BikePGH spokesperson Louis Fineberg said Car Free Fridays was launched last year to promote alternative transportation including bicycling, car-sharing, ride-sharing, walking and public transit.

“We’re not anti-car,” he said. Instead, the intent is to encourage people to think differently about transportation and whether they really need to drive alone, he said.

That message aligns with PT&S’s longstanding support for commuting alternatives. “It’s a natural fit for us,” said PT&S director Kevin Sheehy. Pitt’s fare-free public transit benefit, campus shuttles and support for carpooling, vanpooling, bicycling and walking offer alternatives to dealing with scarce parking in Oakland.

Information on Pitt’s commuting and transit options is available at www.pts.pitt.edu.

This year’s Car Free Fridays highlight a different neighborhood each month with special events in the featured community, as well as in Oakland and Downtown. Some 250 people registered at this season’s initial event in Mt. Lebanon, which included an evening concert, Fineberg said.

June’s featured community is East Liberty, with Whole Foods offering breakfast for bikers there and bike tours scheduled. Other communities to be featured in upcoming months are the North Side, Carnegie, South Side and Lawrenceville. Details on Car Free Fridays events are available at http://bike-pgh.org/events/car-free-fridays.

Fineberg said BikePGH also plans to launch a car-free calculator this summer to enable users to tally the benefits of leaving the car in favor of walking or biking.

Pinning down the size of Pitt’s cycling community is difficult. Sheehy pointed out that several hundred bicycles are entered in the PT&S bike registry, but registration is not limited to Pitt affiliates. For an anecdotal count, he notes that the campus’s bike racks, which accommodate about 1,000 bikes, frequently are filled when the weather is good.

Beyond the University, a vibrant cycling community has emerged in Pittsburgh. Less than a decade ago, Pittsburgh was ranked one of the worst places for bicyclists. Now the city ranks No. 30 in the nation (with 0.77 percent of commuters biking to work) according to the League of American Bicyclists (LAB), which used data from the U.S Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey.

Pittsburgh also made LAB’s list of bicycle-friendly communities, earning a bronze designation for the first time this year. Four-year designations of platinum, gold, silver or bronze are based on the community’s engineering, education, encouragement, enforcement and evaluation efforts.

—Kimberly K. Barlow

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