Marin County Bicycle Coalition

Hello everyone, this is Cella Wright posting about an interview we had with Tom Boss, the membership director of the Marin County Bike Coalition (MCBC) which has been doing many notable deeds since it was formed in 1998. Along with trying to disprove the misconception that many automobile-drivers have about bicyclists and teaching people about the goodness of the biking lifestyle (the positive mental, physical, and environmental effects), MCBC also improves Marin's roads and paths for both bicyclists and pedestrians.The benefits of biking have been proven: a Danish study by scientists Andersen, Schnohr, Schroll and Hein in 2000, proved that people who cycle regularly live longer and healthier lives than those who don't. Biking can be an incredibly invigorating workout (burns calories, builds muscular endurance, and is great aerobic exercise), or a way to simply transport yourself from point A to point B without inflicting environmental damage that would otherwise occur with a motorized vehicle.

Bridge with expanded bike lanes
in Portland, Oregon.

Additionally, biking is fiscally beneficial; "Studies have said that you can actually employ more people building bicycle and pedestrian projects than you can building freeway projects, and there's a bigger bang for your buck-," Tom says,"in Oregon a few years ago, they were trying to get more traffic across a river, and one option was to widen the bridge, which would have cost tens of millions of dollars, [but] they decided to take out one of the lanes and open it up to bicycles, and it turns out that since it is such a 

Inkwells Bridge - part of East-West
Greenway Project by MCBC

bike friendly city, they were able to increase the traffic flow over that bridge for less than a million dollars by putting in a bike lane rather than expanding the bridge for another car lane." MCBC has made many great accomplishments in Marin: in May this year MCBC's Off-Road Trail Access and Education Program opened the new multi-use 680 trail that connects Loma Alta and Terra Linda-Sleepy Hollow Preserves, they have built the North-South Greenway (which includes the Alto Tunnel that connects Mill Valley and Corte Madera, the Lincoln Hill Pathway which connects Terra Linda and downtown San Rafael, and the Central Marin Ferry Connection Project that links the Larkspur ferry with towns and cities to the south), the East-West Greenway (which includes the Inkwells bridge that connects 8 miles of pathways), have educated people of all ages about the benefits of cycling, and have made roads all throughout Marin safe for both pedestrians and bicyclists.MCBC's primary goal is for 20 percent of all trips in Marin to be made by walking or biking by 2020. Tom says that the futures of both biking and MCBC are bright.

In order to learn more about Tom Boss & MCBC, please visit the MCBC Home Page. The interview with Tom Boss will be online in the near future.