Promoting the tree-centered Velo Dendro city bicycle tour on Sat, Oct 23, 8:45 am

Velo Dendro tour, Shreveport
Originally uploaded by trudeau

Notes by Loren Demerath.
Call 734-9101 anytime to record your idea or comment and hear it broadcast on the live show Mondays. Do it! We DARE you!

Anyway:

In attendance: Loren Demerath, Matthew Linn, Hallie Dozier, Carolyn Manning, Maurice Loridans, Kari Brownholland, David Brownholland, Cynthia Keith, Robert Curry, Susan Fontaine, Garrett Johnson

The group welcomed Kari and David Brownholland. Kari worked with a non-profit in St. Louis before moving here with David, who is Centenary’s new organic chemistry professor. (Both awfully nice folks!)

The group heard from Hallie on what we need for the bicycling city tree tour. Promotion is the main need, but the day of the ride we’ll need help with registration work; we need to have a release signed for each rider. Carolyn and Kari both volunteered to help with registration.

We’ll have an ice chest and a trailer with bike repair materials.

The route people think should be the southern half of the route we didn’t get to complete last year. The total is only 15 miles. Last year was tricky going through the arboretum at Centenary; the route was too tight. We’ll start by going south to Betty Virginia Park where there will be a tree planting in honor of Yvonne Lee who was a Shreveport Green employee who was murdered last year; the Bike Pedaler is donating the tree.

Hallie will need people to help marshal the riders.

Our posters didn’t have the effect that we wanted, but where did we get the 100 riders? Maybe from using e-mail lists as well as the organizational meeting Hallie and Matthew held the previous spring. We can send out the same list; it came from Matthew. Mary Allan Hoffman can put it out. Maurice can send it to the Ozark Society, Loren to ABS, Matthew to his list, Ian can send it to his people too; we can all post and publicize on Facebook. Email instead of posters might be sufficient. We can email the people who registered as well. Steph pointed out that Facebook has over 1,500 members, issuing an invite through there is what Matthew is doing, and we can pass it on to the ABS group...

We’re not stealing people from the Tour de Goodwill, because the roadies and the family riders are different groups.

Postcard size fliers that the stores can put in the bags of customers, etc. Kari pledged to finish a postcard flier by Thursday! A specific day!

Bossier is having a bicycle swap this weekend.

The attic of Mickle Hall; or under the Centenary Square parking lot might be good sites for a much needed old bicycle and parts depository.

Would the Theater Department be o.k. with that? Kari will ask if she gets a chance in her capacity as head of Student Academic Services (in which she often talks with faculty about their needs).

Steph reported a request for a letter to the Police Department by wearing a helmet; Kari said helmets aren’t statistically related to safety; can give the impression of bicycling being dangerous; and give cyclists a false sense of security.

Nutcase.com has cool helmets.

The Europeans don’t wear helmets; they’re going slower and sitting upright... the more people that ride the safer you are, and they have more people riding there.

Susan and Garrett passed 5 people biking on Creswell; none were Salmon or Ninjas. (Ninjas have no lights, Salmons go against the flow.)

We can ask why the police don’t wear them, and remind them it sets a good example for kids. Tweedrides and copenhagen cycle chic are the web sites that talk about cycling in business attire.

Susan said we should push for the permanent airpump installation they saw in Baton Rouge. Matthew said he could install one at Columbia Cafe. Maybe RFC could be the downtown companion, or even better the bus station downtown.

Cynthia said Kathryn Usher--who started the ghost tours--said she’d give ABS a personalized ghost tour, maybe for a special ABS meeting.

She also said there’s a boat tour run by Sam Flood, we could also publicize that and meet during on deck one day, perhaps. We do discuss the Red Rive and Cross Bayou’s potential regularly at our meetings.

Caddo Parish is constantly in a state of renovating the parish courthouse, and there’s a hangman on the top floor that’s one of the last ones in existence; that could be integrated into a ghost tour.

Matthew showed on a map he brought how a sector of land the parish has bought will allow stormwater to be absorbed in a much more effective and environmentally healthy.

We’ll talk next week about the bike-ped plan and greenways scope of services. The greenway plan will be initiated by members of Loren’s class this semester as part of a service-learning project. There are other things ABS can do to carry the plan forward.

Cynthia said the Metropolitan Planning Commission heard the arguments for accepting the Master Plan. Two young women came and spoke for it and everything they said paralleled what we’ve talked about in these meetings. They talked about being able to bike down Gilbert, about the riverfront, about downtown, flea market under the Texas st. bridge, mapped and displayed bike routes... one of the MPC members brought up the difficulty of biking from Sams to Willis Knighton. Cynthia spoke at the beginning and mentioned the blog, the dog park, and spoke in favor of the Master Plan.

Susan mentioned we know a person who’s an engineer who’s may be willing to make our dog poop electricity machine. (All it is, Steph said, is an anaerobic digestor, which they have everywhere; they use it for hog waste; Robert said his turkeys behind his gallery generate a fair amount--they’re in the country in winter and summer.)


Next meeting is next Monday, 6 to 7, as usual.