For collegiate bikers, Philly can be tough territory
Aaron Ritz is a self-proclaimed “full-spectrum bike nerd.”
He has a complete assortment of his own personal bicycles, including his favorite, a nine-speed bike he assembled himself with upright handle-bars made of spare parts.
Ritz is the bicycle programs manager for the city of Philadelphia and the program manager for the newly implemented Philadelphia Indego Bike Share.
700 Indego bikes were made available to users throughout the city this past April, and Ritz is at the forefront of bike safety throughout the city.
“Road user safety is a very important part of our office,” Ritz says. “We want to make sure at the end of the day everybody gets home safe. That’s fundamental.”
The Mayor’s Office of Transportation and Utilities planned the new bike share, which currently has 68 stations live in neighborhoods across the city. As of Monday, 13,000 rides have been taken.
“We’re a walking city, a biking city but we’re also a driving and transit city,” Ritz says. “We want to make sure people are safe getting around. We are constantly focused on that.”
The the question of whether or not biking in an urban environment is safe is still an open question. Certain neighborhoods may not be conducive to bikers and users don’t always comply with safety precautions -- like wearing a helmet and abiding by regular traffic laws.
On April 29, Temple University senior lacrosse player and bicyclist Rachel Hall was the victim of a serious hit-and-run accident on the university’s Main Campus in North Philadelphia.
Temple’s Executive Director of Campus Safety Services, Charlie Leone, says Hall is “stable” and “in a holding pattern with her family around her and doctors with her.”
These types of injuries, Leone said, take time to see what develops. And when they occur, it encourages the university and the city to increase awareness for bikers to reduce risks of injury.
“It makes us reflect how easily how something like this can happen,” Leone says.
The university pushes safety programs that encourage students and bikers in the city to wear a helmet, obey traffic laws, have the proper equipment for a well-working bike, wear clothes that are visible at night and avoid riding at night altogether.
Ritz said incidents such as this should not be viewed as “an unavoidable consequence,” but as a way to respond in practical ways to bike safety issues.
Captain Eileen Bradley, Temple’s project coordinator for campus safety, feels that biking in Philly is safe -- for the most part. Bradley was the first officer to patrol Main Campus on a bike in 1980.
She says neighborhoods like the area surrounding Temple, Drexel University, St. Joseph’s University and Center City are easier for bikers to get around because of bike lanes and signage, but places like the northeast section of the city are far less bike-friendly.
And she emphasizes safety is a matter of education and enforcement for not only bikers, but for drivers.
“I think that we’re changing in Philadelphia, I think for the good,” Bradley said. “It’s environmentally good, too, to have bikers instead of cars.”
Ritz said biking in Philly, evident in the number of people biking every day -- 10 to 20,000 every day -- is a popular mode of transportation.
“We know it’s a good place because people choose to do it,” Ritz said. “In large part, you can see that when you see people riding bikes. Compared to other cities we have a high rate of bicycle users.”
Emily Rolen is a student at Temple University and a summer 2015 Paste BN Collegiate Correspondent.
This story originally appeared on the Paste BN College blog, a news source produced for college students by student journalists. The blog closed in September of 2017.