I hope you all don’t mind a bit of an off topic post today, but I am hoping that a few of you readers can help me out. Many of you know that I live in Greenville, South Carolina. I have mentioned several times before that this town in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountians is a great place to live and ride. As the advocacy chairperson for the Greenville Spinners Bicycle Club, I am interested in doing what I can to make this area an even better place to ride a bike.
One idea that I would like to see implemented here in Greenville is a “Share the Road” message on our local buses (we just recently got bike racks on all of our buses, so this seems like a good next step). Our City government just took over the administration of the transit system and will be repainting all the buses soon, so now is a good time to really push this idea. I took the picture shown here of the back of a MARTA bus in Atlanta not too long ago. I like this ad, which was done by the Atlanta Bicycle Campaign, because it not only asks drivers to share the road with cyclists, but it features a real person on the bike. In my opinion, a real human face does a better job of reinforcing the message to watch out for cyclists on the roads than does a little stylized icon of a bicycle.
Since this blog has readers all over the world, many of you living in bike friendly cities, I thought it would be a good idea to pose the question; Do any of you have “Share the Road” message on buses, bus stops, etc in your town? In particular, I would love to hear success stories about such programs in other cities. If any of you could let me know about them with a comment or an email, I would greatly appreciate it.
While you are at it, don’t just limit ideas to the “Share the Road” message on public transit. I have seen other really good ideas for spreading the message, like the “and we bike” campaign in Washington County Oregon. I would love to hear about other creative ways that cities have effectively spread the message to share the road. Thanks in advance for any links that you all can provide. I’ll be back to bicycle design related posts next week.
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