Blame gas prices. As per-gallon rates hit $4 during the summer, cars started to look like less of a convenience and more of a burden. To avoid mounting costs, some people explored rail commuting and jumped on the Sounder or Link Light Rail. Some people hopped on the bus. Some commuters hooked up with a carpool. The cool kids bought motor scooters. The rich ones bought hybrid cars. The rest of us — whether cornered by small incomes or inspired to become healthy and alive — have one option: ride a bike. 

 

But getting to and from on bicycle in Tacoma isn’t easy, say many local observers. That was the conclusion drawn by a group of brave souls who took to the streets recently to experience what it's like to conquer Tacoma by bike.  A group consisting of Tacoma City Council members, planning commissioners, city staff, and members of Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber met in the Proctor District, East Tacoma, and near the Scott Pierson trail off Union in the early morning hours. They all saddled up and peddled their way to the Tacoma Municipal Building on Market Street during rush hour. 

 

It was all worthwhile, says Tacoma-Pierce County Chamber’s Jessica Holden, and it made one thing perfectly clear: if Tacoma’s going to be a biking town, we have some work to do. 

 

“Vehicles were a real challenge,” says Holden. “Tacoma drivers aren’t used to having bicyclists out there with them. There are definitely some infrastructure needs.” 

 

And that’s just the beginning. Holden notes that, as in many cities, local officials are just now beginning to consider the needs of the two-wheeled minority — at least on a large scale. If Tacoma’s ever to become a biking town, motorists need to get used to bikes on the road; city planners need to think about how to make paths for cyclists on existing byways; cyclists need to learn how best to navigate the streets and blend with traffic — the list goes on. According to notes posted by the Chamber’s Chelsea Levy, conclusions drawn during the city and Chamber-led bike to work junket included several key challenges.  

 

Road conditions were inconsistent and often dangerous, for example. Riders had to contend with potholes, cracked streets, and other hazards. Note: swerving to avoid a pothole in traffic, among Hummers and Bonnevilles driven by sleepy commuters, can be a deadly event. God help bikers who have to swerve around cars and trucks both parked and mobile. 

 

Some riders noted that Tacoma streets need better signage. There is some signage, but newer riders had a hard time deciphering them, or using them to understand how trails or bike lanes connected. 

 

Others noted that the Pierce County bike map needs help. 

Until recently, bike maps have been fashioned for use by recreational users rather than commuters. Tacoma’s downtown core and residential neighborhoods need their own detailed guide map, and it needs to incorporate connecting points for other public transportation modes — buses, rail lines and the like. 

Tory Grant, manager of the Old Town branch of Old Town Bicycle and an avid biker, says that his biking experience in Tacoma hasn’t been much better than his biking experience in Puyallup, where he lives. He also says that Puyallup is the worst place to bike, ever. Grant says road conditions, vehicle traffic, lack of biking infrastructure such as bike lanes and connected trails make it hard to get around. 

“Tacoma’s not the most cycling friendly city,” he says. 

Old Town Bicycle co-owner Dmitri Keating says Tacoma’s biking situation has improved in recent years but admits that he really only rides anywhere near downtown on weekends, when there are few cars on the roads. And while he lauds recent Bike to Work events as commendable, Keating says he thinks that Tacoma has a long way to go before cycling becomes a viable option for most commuters. 

"Light Rail and other rail tracks that crisscross the city’s streets, for example, are particularly hazardous for cyclists, he says. Intersections are built for cars, he adds, and can prove treacherous for folks on two wheels. The preponderance of curbside and angled parking adds to the treachery.



Add to that a preponderance of hills — he notes 11th and 15th streets among the most challenging slogs — and you have a real challenge to making Tacoma a nice place to bike. But even flat planes such as Pacific Avenue can be downright scary for cyclists to traverse. 

“There’s just no way to bike down that road unless you want to ride on the sidewalk,” says Keating. “I’ve been riding a long time, and it’s fricking scary down there. The lawyers who work downtown might want to ride a bike to work, but they don’t want to be killed doing it.” 

But making the roads safe for cyclists isn’t solely up to city planners, says Bob Myrich, who claims that Tacoma is certainly as cyclist-friendly as Seattle if not more so. 

Myrich’s list of cycling credentials is long and impressive. He helped draft Pierce County’s non-motorized commute plan in 1997. He’s a former triathlete. He rode his bike four miles daily from 60th and Pacific to the Public Utilities Building at 35th and Union for seven years and served as the poster child for the then brand-new “Bike to Work” program before retiring from Tacoma Water in 1997. He’s currently gearing up to help Tacoma officials draft their own non-motorized transportation plan, with work beginning in 2009, and is the government and community relations lead for Tacoma Wheelman’s Bicycle Club, a volunteer organization that serves “to promote and develop safe bicycling for recreation, health and alternate transportation,” according to its Web site. 

So this guy is sort of like the King Solomon of biking in Tacoma. 

Myrich often wonders why he doesn’t see more people biking to work in Tacoma, which he contends is easier to negotiate on two wheels than Seattle and certainly isn’t much harder to bike than downtown Olympia. 

“Seattle has 6,000 people that enter and leave the city core every day on bikes, and they don’t have a lot that makes it cycling compatible,” he says. “I’ve always said that we’ve needed a study to figure out why more people don’t cycle in Tacoma. Even in University Place they have a world-class system, but they don’t use it.” 

Metaphysical speculation aside, Myrich doesn’t have an answer to the question about a dearth of cyclists in Tacoma. But he does know what local officials are planning to do about it. 

In a recent conversation with City Manager Eric Anderson, Myrich learned that $500,000 has been slated for bicycle improvements in soon-to-be-drafted transportation plans for the city. That money will go toward features such as so-called sharrows, which consist of painted markers on the street that encourage motorists to be aware of cyclists and remind them to share the road. Sharrows cost less than road signs, he mentions.  

Larger planning efforts will reportedly include networks of five bike trails that will connect Pierce County from Gig Harbor to downtown Tacoma to Orting to South Tacoma … and so on. These trails will be like freeways for cyclists with arterial streets, sidewalks, streets with bike lanes, and streets lined with sharrows threading communities and neighborhoods together and connecting them to the county-wide network. 

But that plan is a long way off from implementation, says Myrich, attributing the stretched timelines to dwindling county and city budgets as well as a particular shortage of money for trails. 

In the meantime, Myrich suggests education as a means of nudging people toward cycling. Simple encouragement, training, and help finding routes would be enough to get many cyclists on the road. 

“You can do such powerful things with education,” says Myrich, “as opposed to engineering everything.” 

Myrich says that the Pierce County Health Department is leading the charge and that efforts by the city of Tacoma to get the word out about cycling and other commute alternatives should be applauded. Facts and information are important if we want to get people out on the road. 

For example: Three to five miles is considered a convenient commute distance for most cyclists as most can travel this distance in 20 minutes or so. A survey of Pierce County maps showed that nearly all major destinations were within three miles of major population centers. Drawing three-mile-equivalent rings around map-points of downtown Tacoma, the Tacoma Mall, Point Defiance and other destination spots left no gaps, says Myrich. 

“It’s all connectable,” he says. 

While we wait for the county, city, etc. to engineer pathways, Myrich encourages would-be cyclists to learn all they can about cycling, routes, local organizations, and resources. Then he suggests taking a weekend, when roads are clear, to map out routes between home and frequent destinations. Start with work. He said folks will be surprised how many navigable routes exist. The benefits, if a route is found to travel, are enormous — better health, less pollution, decreased stress, decreased collective dependence on fossil fuels, and better moods, for starters. 

Did we mention that Myrich rocked a triathlon the year he retired? Yeah. Biking is badass.