I like to drive. I like cars.
I'm sure all of you in this room do too.
But I'd like to ask you a question,
that is, what happens when you don't have any more;
that is the same situation that I found myself in.
I didn't have any, I lost my car.
So I realized at that point
that I was going to have to do something else.
I was gonna have to walk or use the bus
or dare I say it, use my bike.
It's pretty much when I started to realize
that Lexington, the community I live in,
has a wonderful array of facilities.
When I say facilities, I mean bike paths.
It can also mean some other things, but we're talking about paths.
And I realized that we have a lot of really good infrastructure in Lexington.
But we also sometimes don't really succeed very well.
I found myself in many situations where I thought
wow, this is really dangerous.
This is not, this is not cool.
So let me think, why do people ride their bikes,
why do people choose other forms of transportation?
And I realized that, for me, it was because I had to.
I found myself in situations where it was the only choice I had.
But then I also found how much I enjoyed it,
how healthy it was and all other benefits
that come along with riding a bike,
especially like getting everywhere pretty quickly.
Did you know that on average in Lexington,
it takes you to drive 25 miles per hour,
it doesn't matter if you go 80 to make that green light
you will still gonna get there in the same time:
from Hamburg to downtown, you can get there in 30 minutes.
That's about the same as with a car.
So I decided that I needed to start to rethink the order.
the hierarchy of speed, as I call it, of transportation.
It doesn't mean that we value the car or the bus or the bike or walking,
as any of them being higher.
I needed to rethink how I thought about my transportation.
Because right now, we kind of value the car the most
and everything else just seems kind of ancillary.
So 90% of people, they drive their cars to work
and only 0.6% ride their bikes.
But yet, 70% car rides and car trips are less than 2 miles.
You can travel 25 mph on average on the bike
just the same as you can in a car.
There's no reason to,
the bike suddenly becomes just as important or just viable as a vehicle.
So when we start to balance our decision-making process
for how we decide what vehicles to use, bike, walking or cars, specifically bikes,
then you start to think more critically about how you're getting somewhere
and choosing the right form of transportation.
It's about, not riding because we have to
but it's about riding because you want to.
And that made me think also,
what kind of people are riding their bikes,
because that's kind of important.
If you have people who ride all the time and then you have people who don't,
how do you get better infrastructure?
What takes lots of people riding, more people riding?
And so I thought, who is this audience,
who are the people who are not riding?
It made me think about basically everyone, who is riding or not?
So first you have this person.
This person is just everyone:
a college student, a co-worker, just everyday life.
And then you have, of course, the hipsters who ride to anything.
They ride on the snow,
they ride on the highway,
they probably ride in front of you, making you pretty angry sometimes.
And then of course you have the professionals,
they do it for fitness, they do it for triathlons,
they do it for their living, as bike messengers and pros,
Lance Armstrong, Tour de France, all that stuff.
But then you also have people who just do for recreation.
Here we see somebody who's retired.
They may decide suddenly to pull their bike out of the garage.
But it doesn't have to be any of these particular cases.
It seems that if we talk to the audience of people who put their bikes away,
mainly those who graduate college and start to start their families,
grow their lives and start their first job.
They do, they put their bike in that garage,
and they don't pull it back out again until retirement.
So we started taking these groups:
retirees, people who use it just for recreation,
people who just do it on weekends for fun,
and as well as the regular people who just travel.
They got to work.
They are starting their lives off.
And those people need to ride.
When we start to do that, start to choose
and think of our complete transportation system
as a series of viable options,
depending on what you are doing,
where you are going, why you are doing
how far is it, how fast you need to get there.
Then you can start to figure out
how you're going to actually get from one place to another with just your bike
and how you might choose your bike to get to those places
instead of the normal car or other forms of transportation.
And by doing that,
we will start to actually see an increase in ridership in our communities.
And thus we will get better infrastructures. So it's not so dangerous.
I'd like to challenge everyone in this room
to think before you get in your cars or even on a bus
and try to consider how you might choose a bike instead
so that you'll improve the lives of all cyclists in your community.
Thank you.
(Applause)