If You Build It, They Will Come

By Bruce Cohen - February 19, 2014

We know you’ve heard the phrase “if you build, they will come”. Well how about “if you build a bike route, they will ride.” Board of Directors Member, Kevin King sent over this worthy article from Crains Detroit Business online, by Rod Kackley.

Grand Rapids officials, inspired by dreams of becoming a bicycling mecca like Ann Arbor, are putting together a 100-mile urban bike network. The U.S. Census Bureau’s 2011 American Community Survey estimated that 0.4 percent of the 81,823 people working in the city of Grand Rapids rode a bicycle to work. That’s only 334 people. But when Atomic Object put a single bike rack outside its Grand Rapids office, “all of a sudden, there were more bikes than could be secured, so we added another,” said Mary O’Neill, business manager of the Grand Rapids-based software development company, which also has an office in Detroit. “Then we realized there were people who wanted to bike in all seasons of the year, so we looked at a place to store bikes inside,” O’Neill said. Despite humble Census numbers, more employers in Grand Rapids may be pushed by their workers to follow Atomic Object’s lead as the city government works to become more bicycle-friendly and encourage more people to pedal to work.

Read the full article here.