WEBVTT

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I like to drive. I like cars.

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I'm sure all of you in this room do too.

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But I'd like to ask you a question,

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that is, what happens
when you don't have any more;

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that is the same situation
that I found myself in.

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I didn't have any, I lost my car.

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So I realized at that point

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that I was going to have
to do something else.

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I was gonna have to walk or use the bus

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or dare I say it, use my bike.

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It's pretty much when I started to realize

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that Lexington, the community I live in,

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has a wonderful array of facilities.

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When I say facilities, I mean bike paths.

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It can also mean some other things,
but we're talking about paths.

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And I realized that we have a lot of
really good infrastructure in Lexington.

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But we also sometimes
don't really succeed very well.

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I found myself in many situations
where I thought

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wow, this is really dangerous.

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This is not, this is not cool.

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So let me think,
why do people ride their bikes,

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why do people choose
other forms of transportation?

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And I realized that,
for me, it was because I had to.

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I found myself in situations
where it was the only choice I had.

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But then I also found
how much I enjoyed it,

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how healthy it was and all other benefits

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that come along with riding a bike,

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especially like getting
everywhere pretty quickly.

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Did you know that on average in Lexington,

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it takes you to drive 25 miles per hour,

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it doesn't matter if you go 80
to make that green light

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you will still gonna get there
in the same time:

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from Hamburg to downtown,
you can get there in 30 minutes.

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That's about the same as with a car.

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So I decided that
I needed to start to rethink the order.

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the hierarchy of speed,
as I call it, of transportation.

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It doesn't mean that we value the car
or the bus or the bike or walking,

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as any of them being higher.

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I needed to rethink how I thought
about my transportation.

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Because right now,
we kind of value the car the most

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and everything else
just seems kind of ancillary.

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So 90% of people,
they drive their cars to work

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and only 0.6% ride their bikes.

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But yet, 70% car rides and car trips
are less than 2 miles.

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You can travel 25 mph
on average on the bike

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just the same as you can in a car.

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There's no reason to,

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the bike suddenly becomes just
as important or just viable as a vehicle.

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So when we start to balance
our decision-making process

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for how we decide what vehicles to use,
bike, walking or cars, specifically bikes,

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then you start to think more critically
about how you're getting somewhere

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and choosing the right form
of transportation.

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It's about, not riding because we have to

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but it's about riding because you want to.

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And that made me think also,

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what kind of people
are riding their bikes,

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because that's kind of important.

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If you have people who ride all the time
and then you have people who don't,

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how do you get better infrastructure?

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What takes lots of people riding,
more people riding?

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And so I thought, who is this audience,

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who are the people who are not riding?

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It made me think about basically
everyone, who is riding or not?

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So first you have this person.

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This person is just everyone:

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a college student, a co-worker,
just everyday life.

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And then you have, of course,
the hipsters who ride to anything.

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They ride on the snow,

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they ride on the highway,

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they probably ride in front of you,
making you pretty angry sometimes.

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And then of course
you have the professionals,

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they do it for fitness,
they do it for triathlons,

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they do it for their living,
as bike messengers and pros,

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Lance Armstrong, Tour de France,
all that stuff.

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But then you also have
people who just do for recreation.

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Here we see somebody who's retired.

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They may decide suddenly
to pull their bike out of the garage.

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But it doesn't have to be
any of these particular cases.

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It seems that if we talk to the audience
of people who put their bikes away,

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mainly those who graduate college
and start to start their families,

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grow their lives
and start their first job.

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They do, they put their bike
in that garage,

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and they don't pull it back out again
until retirement.

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So we started taking these groups:

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retirees, people who use it
just for recreation,

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people who just do it
on weekends for fun,

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and as well as the regular people 
who just travel.

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They got to work.

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They are starting their lives off.

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And those people need to ride.

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When we start to do that, start to choose

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and think of our
complete transportation system

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as a series of viable options, 


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depending on what you are doing,

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where you are going, why you are doing

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how far is it,
how fast you need to get there.

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Then you can start to figure out


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how you're going to actually get from
one place to another with just your bike

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and how you might choose your bike
to get to those places

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instead of the normal car
or other forms of transportation.

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And by doing that,

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we will start to actually see an increase
in ridership in our communities.

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And thus we will get better
infrastructures. So it's not so dangerous.

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I'd like to challenge
everyone in this room

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to think before you get in your cars
or even on a bus

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and try to consider
how you might choose a bike instead

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so that you'll improve the lives
of all cyclists in your community.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)