Stay home! Watch the live stream!

Tomorrow, Bikemore in partnership with Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition, and Real News Network, are hosting our Council President Transportation Forum.

In an abundance of caution regarding the spread of COVID-19, the forum will no longer be open to the public, but will be available to watch by live stream. 

Nick Mosby, Leon Pinkett, Shannon Sneed, Dan Sparaco, and Carl Stokes are all still scheduled to participate. We hope you can join us online.

For those who can not watch the livestream, a recording will also be available for future viewing. 

Candidate questionnaires for City Council races have just been published - find your district candidates here: www.ibikeivote.com. 

Bikemore is committed to ensuring Baltimore City voters are informed and encouraged to vote in the Primary Election on April 28th. Stay tuned for further analysis of the races and ways we can continue to be champions of equitable transportation. 

Mayoral Transportation Forum Recording

On Wednesday, February 26, Bikemore in Action hosted our first Mayoral Transportation Forum with five leading mayoral candidates: Sheila Dixon, Mary Miller, Brandon Scott, Thiru Vignarajah, and Mary Washington.

This event would not have been possible without the support of our partners Baltimore Transit Equity Coalition, Central Maryland Transportation Alliance, and the Real News Network.

You can watch the recording of the forum below.

A roving block party connects neighbors to Druid Hill Park

A key part of our mission at Bikemore is improving connectivity to our public parks - a core piece of building a safer, healthier, and more livable city. Back at our October Bike Leaders Breakfast, our long-time friend and public artist Graham Coreil-Allen brought flyers and shared the goals of Arches & Access, an event he co-organized, to illuminate the connections between West Baltimore neighborhoods and Druid Hill Park.

We showed up in West Baltimore on the night of Sunday, November 3rd, joining over three hundred residents from the neighborhoods surrounding Druid Hill Park who came together to create a space for a roving block party and parade on Druid Park Lake Drive. People danced, marched, performed, and celebrated access to public green space. 

The event was first conceived by artist Jessy DeSantis and advocate Courtney Bettle, both Reservoir Hill residents, as an idea based off DeSantis’ colorful painting of the historic arch on Madison Avenue and Druid Park Lake Drive. Later teaming up with Coreil-Allen, who lives on Auchentoroly Terrace, they organized a light exhibit through the Neighborhood Lights initiative of the Brilliant Baltimore/Festival of Light and Literature. Together, they expanded their original vision of lighting up the arch to include a parade of solar-powered lights leading into the park and ending at an equally vibrant Rawlings Conservatory.

“Collectively they expanded the vision to include solar powered lights leading into the park, activated by a joyful community parade showing what life could be like without highways hindering pedestrian access to Druid Hill Park.”

A parade studded with a marching band, Benevolent Bubbles’ lighted bikes, and speeches from neighborhood leaders, including 7th District Councilperson Leon Pinkett, created a welcoming, exciting environment that attracted many who joined from side streets and through the Big Jump.  

The organizers shared that by the end of the night, residents were already looking forward to making Arches & Access an annual event to unite communities of West Baltimore with Druid Hill Park. Through a lively parade, they truly accomplished their goal of “show[ing] what life could be like without highways hindering pedestrian access to Druid Hill Park.”

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This need for safe access for people who bike, walk, and use mobility devices is why we’ve been building relationships in the neighborhoods surrounding Druid Hill Park for years. When the Druid Hill Expressway was built, the five-lane highway separated neighbors from safely and comfortably accessing a vital greenspace in the city. When we installed the Big Jump along 28th St and Druid Park Lake Drive, it created access for people to travel between West and Central Baltimore. It decreased the speed of traffic and shortened crosswalks to make it easier for neighbors to walk to Druid Hill Park. 

The liveliness of the celebration that neighbors created reinforced that the work we do at Bikemore is not to reinvent the wheel. Communities have always known what they want: streets for people. 

We are constantly seeking to uplift the strength, creativity, and power that residents already have.

This is why we spent more of our capacity in 2019 than ever on community building. We don’t need to be the center of work for transportation change. In creating an equitable transit system, the process is just as important as the deliverable. That means that we have to center the voices of people who have been advocating for safer streets that have also been historically and structurally ignored.

In 2020, we want to support more of our neighbors - so that they can create spaces that prioritize connectivity and accessibility to parks in our city; so that they can activate their community; so that they can be the leaders of political change in Baltimore. 

Help us support changemakers across Baltimore by donating to Bikemore today. We can build Complete Streets together.

Make a Direct Action Donation (501c4)

Direct Action donations are our greatest need. They can fund everything we do, including directly lobbying elected officials, running grassroots organizing campaigns, and advocating for or against legislation. They are not tax-deductible.

Make a Charitable Donation (501c3)

Charitable donations fund our education, organizing, and programming, and may be tax-deductible.

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Read more about Arches & Access at the blog post from TAP Druid Hill. 

Sharing community through Cranksgiving

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While we were preparing for Cranksgiving this year, we were excited to continue the now five-year-long tradition of bringing the bike community together to have fun, ride bikes, and benefit our greater Baltimore community through donating food to local organizations. 

But Cranksgiving this year was so much more than we had imagined! 

213 people rode.
61 teams participated.
5 teams had at least one youth rider.
7 teams participated in our WTF (womens/trans/femme/non-binary) category.
27 volunteers shared their time to make Cranksgiving a reality.
26 business supported us through cash sponsorships and donations.
10 people without a bike borrowed one from Rec and Parks.
At the end of the day, we packed up our van with over 1200 food items and over 1300 pounds of food to donate!

While we’ve always held fast to our rule of giving out scores based on purchasing each item on the list, rather than the total quantity of items, many people earned good karma points by bringing back multiples of each item. A volunteer scored one team that had five of each item! 

We started Cranksgiving as a way to bring together the biking community to give back, but it’s become much more. Riders who have never gone grocery shopping on their bike before tried it for the first time. People who came to the ride solo found teams and new friends to ride with. We’ve strengthened our relationship with Moveable Feast and the Franciscan Center, helping us to deepen the conversation around the intersection of transportation and the meaningful community work they do.

As Bikemore continues to grow, our programs grow, and the community we bring together through Cranksgiving grows.

We are grateful for the businesses, organizations, and people that contributed to making Cranksgiving a success through donating money, space, food, and prizes. Our volunteers took complete charge of running the logistics of Cranksgiving, from registering the 85 people on-site to stamping manifests to counting up food and scores.

Thank you to all who participated in Cranksgiving this year, and we hope to see you riding with us next year! 

Check out the full photo album here.

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Afghan Cycles screening brings together neighbors, riders, and local advocates

Bikemore focuses on making Baltimore a safer, more connected and accessible place for people who bike and walk, and that’s often thought of as ensuring that there are places to ride without fear of getting hit by a car. But we know that personal safety is way more complex than that. What determines if someone feels safe on our streets and in our public space involves a lot of complex layers of race, class, gender, and culture — and we know that’s especially true here in Baltimore. And that’s why we were excited to bring a screening of Afghan Cycles, a documentary about the challenges and victories women cycling in Afghanistan face, to Baltimore.

We were proud to work with the Creative Alliance, Asylee Women's Enterprise, Southeast CDC, and the Patterson Park Girls Mountain Biking Team to host a neighborhood bike ride and show this film that speaks to the importance and intersection of what safety means and feels like on the road for people biking.

Coaches Becky Redett and Cathy Witt along with two youth riders from the Patterson Park Girls Mountain Bike Team led us through Patterson Park, where they practice regularly. They showed us the grassy hill next to the Pagoda where they learned to descend and rode down a few stairs to show off the bike handling skills they’ve learned. The riders shared that learning how to mountain bike — in Patterson Park, on trails outside of the city, and at races — has provided them a whole lot of confidence and fun, and the coaches shared what it takes to start a youth bike team. (They’re always looking for volunteer helpers and coaches — get in touch!)

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Molly McCullagh, Director of Neighborhood Revitalization from Southeast Community Development led us through the Patterson Park neighborhood. She highlighted a mural at Fayette and Milton by artists Shawn James and Charles Lawrence, along with an adjacent artistic bus stop bench by sculptors Tim Scofield and Kyle Miller. She also showed us the community led art and greening efforts at Library Square. Along with the BUS sculptural bus stop next to the Creative Alliance, Molly pointed out creative placemaking projects that connect transportation to art and local culture, providing respite and beauty for transit riders and neighbors alike.

Our hope is that the ride and screening it inspired participants to think more intentionally about how we can create acceptance and safety for bicyclists in our community: both in the broader world and in Baltimore.

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