Kidical Mass

Resources for Family Biking and Biking with Kids

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

The Best Resources for Family Biking and Biking with Kids (Photo: Group of families with their bikes)

 

My son and his cherry-red bike loops around the park, over and over again. There’s not really anything exciting about the park, just following a narrow path along some grass, ducking behind the building with the bathrooms, twisting through the playground, and cruising by the pavilion. But he’s riding it as if it’s the Tour de France, pedaling his heart out with the joy of biking.

While we haven’t quite graduated to the road, I love how clearly he is in love with biking. As a kid who loved biking with my parents and a mom who finds freedom on the bike, few things could make me happier.

But I haven’t built his love of biking by myself. I’ve definitely had some help from the family biking community, a world-wide group of parents who love to bike and want to pass it on to their kids. Whether you want to know the best way to carry your kid on your bike or the best bike to purchase for your kid, here are some great places to get started:

Continue reading →

Family Biking Profiles: Kathleen Youell

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

Family Biking Profiles_ Kathleen Youell-2

May is National Bike Month! To celebrate, I’ll be profiling some awesome families who bike with their kids for transportation and recreation. Later on, I’ll also highlight some excellent resources for family biking.

Here’s the fourth of my Bike Month family biking profiles, following Leanne, Kate, and Stacy. This interview comes courtesy of Kathleen Youell, who lives in the bike utopia of Inner SE Portland, OR. (If only we were all so lucky!) She has two children, a son who is almost eleven and a daughter who recently turned nine. While her family is originally from Sacramento, they moved to Oregon about eight years ago. She runs portlandize.com, tweets @kyouell and is one of the administrators of the PDX Cargo Bike Gang Facebook group.

Continue reading →

Bike Month: Family Biking Profiles, Stacy Bisker of A Simple Six

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment
Family Biking Profiles_ Stacy Bisker of A Simple Six

Yes, these really are all Stacy’s family’s bikes. Courtesy of A Simple Six.

May is National Bike Month! To celebrate, I’ll be profiling some awesome families who bike with their kids for transportation and recreation. Later on, I’ll also highlight some excellent resources for family biking. So far, I’ve interviewed Kate and Leanne, both in Washington D.C.

This interview presents a change of scenery, with answers from Stacy Bisker, who lives in the bitter cold of Buffalo, NY. (I’m originally from upstate New York and even thinking of Buffalo gives me chills. I went to a Bills game there once in the winter and it was one of the coldest times of my life.) It’s especially impressive because she has four children (14, 12, 9 and 6 years old) and mainly bikes for transportation. You can find her family on Facebook, Instagram, and the archive of her blog at A Simple Six.

Continue reading →

Guest Post: Kidical Mass Rockville Kick-Off

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

Biking, and particularly family biking, is a passion for me. I want to make our roads safe and fun for everyone to travel on, including children. So to help encourage families to bring their kids on bikes for both recreation and transportation, I lead Kidical Mass rides in our town. Kidical Mass is a national movement to support family biking and we’re one of five of them in the Washington D.C. area – one of the highest densities in the nation!

We had our first Kidical Mass ride of the season last week and it went really well. Thirteen people including six kids showed up to ride to ice cream. I’ve written it up on our Kidical Mass Rockville blog, so check it out!

The Season Starts off Right with Italian Ice!

Envisioning the Future of Family Bicycling

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

Being in the middle of a burgeoning movement is exciting; being in the start can be pretty lonely. Fortunately, the bicycling for transportation movement in the U.S. is starting to embrace its more youthful sibling, the family biking movement. Last weekend, I attended the Washington Area Bicyclists’ Association (WABA) first D.C. area Family Biking Town Hall.

The event began with participants rotating through a series of stations, each inviting our input on a different subject. The topics ranged from ideas for the perfect family biking event (my favorite is the ABCs of Family Cycling) to best blogs for family cycling. They even asked to how to make the 50 States and 13 Colonies Ride more family-friendly. I think my best input was the important advice to try equipment with your kids before you buy it, so you don’t end up with a trailer your kid doesn’t like, as we did.

Besides the stations, I was glad for the opportunty to connect with some biking folks I haven’t seen in a while. While I expected to see the leaders of the DC and Gaithersburg Kidical Mass rides, I was pleasantly surprised to run into a prior member of the Rockville Bicycle Advisory Committee who as far as I knew had disappeared off the face of the earth. As it turned out, he had been a little closer – in Colorado, on a contract. Previously, he had helped us run bike rodeos for kids, so I was glad to see that he was still engaged in youth education. Sometimes, this city is so small and so full of talented, passionate people.

The WABA education director than gave a brief presentation that led into the main discussion. WABA acknowledged that they had been remiss in the past when they had frequently ignored the needs of families. One of the main problems is a simple lack of experience – only 1 of their 13 staff members has children. Considering the average salary of a staff member of a small non-profit and our local living costs, this fact didn’t exactly surprise me. Nonetheless, he said that WABA has realized that family cycling is “bleeding edge” and wants to ensure DC is one of the leaders in this next big step forward. While they can’t dedicate any specific staff members to the issue, they hope to integrate families into their current efforts and start some new family-oriented programming in the future. They finished with a pitch for their holiday party, which unfortunately reinforced their focus on young 20 and 30-somethings, as it was at a bar on a weekday night. At least they’re honest about their room to improve.

The discussion began with a broad visioning effort to describe an ideal family-biking location, then quickly broadened to include infrastructure needs, advocacy efforts and resources.

One thing everyone could agree on is that we want family bicycling to be normal, the way it is in Amsterdam and Japan, land of the “mommy bike.” Whether it’s pediatricians, drivers, or even other cyclists, we’re sick of people second-guessing our parenting and transportation decisions. As Megan from Kidical Mass DC said, we’ll have reached our goal “when people bike with their kids who didn’t bike before” simply because it’s the easiest, cheapest, most sustainable way to get around.

We also universally agreed that there’s a lack of centralized resources on family biking for current and expecting parents. While there are some home-grown blogs and a smattering of articles, there’s nothing that can walk people through all of the possible equipment, its advantages and disadvantages, and the process of actually choosing which one would work for them. One of the participants imagined a future where expecting parents learned about family biking options before they arrived at the hospital, just as they do now with car seats.

A desire for more protected bicycle infrastructure that is segregated from traffic was another common theme. What works for an experienced cyclist won’t necessarily work for a mom on a bakfiets maxing out at 10 mph or an eight year old on her own bike.

We also discussed the need to include parental voices in the policy conversation. One woman from Fairfax bemoaned the lack of female representation on bicycle advisory committees, as women are more likely to bring up issues relating to families. Fortunately, DC actually has strong representation in this category – the heads of both the Rockville and Arlington groups are women and at least half of Rockville’s committee is – but we can always do better. Another major problem is that a lot of the city meetings where people give testimony are very difficult for parents of young children to attend. WABA seemed interested in helping people know when and how to submit written comments as well as gathering testimonies to present at city hearings.

While none of this will happen overnight, it was encouraging to connect with other folks concerned about the same day-to-day issues and see a (bike) path forward. I’m excited to see what WABA will do with our input.

Unfortunately, almost every time I attend a family biking event, the commute reminds me of how far we have to go. The original plan was for Chris to drop me off after church and then drive home for Sprout’s nap. I would then get a Bikeshare bike and pedal two miles to the most convenient Metro station. The first hurdle was that the two closest Bikeshare stations were completely empty, forcing me to walk more than 1/3 of a mile to pick one up. Once I finally checked out my bike, I pedaled toward the National Zoo, only to find out that the road looping up and around the zoo was closed for construction. As the only other option was miles out of the way, I ended up walking my bike all the way up the zoo’s main path, which is a mile-long hill. It was only until I reached the parking lot that I was able to pick up a road. I ended up only biking a half-mile of the 2 mile trip, making it take more than twice as long as it should have.

Even though I don’t haul Sprout everywhere by bike (yet), I look forward to the day our vision is fulfilled and owning a cargo bike will be just a normal as owning a minivan is now.

Fighting the Good Fight for Family Biking

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

Early November is a challenging time to bike. In my region, it tends to be cold, windy and wet. So I really wasn’t looking forward to our last Kidical Mass ride of the season, a joint ride with our sister group in nearby Gaithersburg.I was tempted to cancel our half, considering the low temperatures. However, the city had promoted it in both their monthly newsletter and their Facebook page, so I felt obliged to show up in case anyone from Rockville trekked over. Despite a few literal wrong turns, I’m glad I went. My ride to the meeting place and lunch with fellow family biking advocates highlighted a number of our shared challenges.

Our meeting place was about eight miles from my house, so it was too far to bring Sprout in the trailer. As the car trunk doesn’t fit both the bike and trailer, I rode there towing the trailer while Chris drove himself and Sprout. Unfortunately, I got rather lost on the way. While my intended route wasn’t ideal, my detour truly illustrated the infrastructure barriers families face in using cycling for transportation. I cycled over paths and curb cuts that were so bumpy and narrow they’d be uncomfortable or even unsafe for a kid in a trailer. Multi-use trails paralleling major, high-speed roads ended abruptly, forcing me onto the sidewalk. Even those were piecemeal. One sidewalk was split by a single piece of property with a fence, rendering the entire sidewalk on that side of the road useless. Crossing signals at intersections were too short, infrequent or non-existant. Intersections at major roads lacked islands to stand on as you crossed multiple lanes of traffic. I was very glad I didn’t bring Sprout – I would have been quite nervous about his safety.

In contrast, my destination – one of the first planned “smart growth” communities in the country – it was lovely. The residential roads had street parking, but were relatively quiet. A whole network of trails connected different parts of the development.

Moving from one area to the other, it was obvious that while there are islands of high bikability, they’re separated from each other and riding between them is problematic. I’m fortunate to live in one of those islands, especially one that’s well-connected. But the further you go out in the suburbs and away from the semi-urban core, it becomes increasingly more difficult. While it’s nice that people can ride around their neighborhoods, achieving even a “car-light” society where people can rely on biking, walking, and transit for their transportation needs requires a much more comprehensive, connected system than we have now.

When I finally arrived after my misadventure, the ride ended up being me, Sprout, and the Kidical Mass Gaithersburg organizers. We went ahead anyway, believing seeing families out and about on their bikes in such brisk weather sent an important message to the community. Afterwards, we went to the Farmer’s Market and a cafe, where we discussed the particular issues we face with family biking.

One problem we kept coming back to was a lack of understanding of family biking from pretty much everyone, non-cyclists and cyclists alike.

On the non-cyclists’ side, there’s the eternal cry of “But it’s not safe!” The Gaithersburg folks told me that their elementary school won’t allow students to bike there, even though the school is inside a neighborhood designed to be walkable and bikable. If that’s a rule in a “smart growth” community, the rest of us are doomed. Perhaps most frustratingly, the school appears completely uninterested in changing that status quote. The cry of “unsafe!” shuts down the conversation instead of opening it up to the question, “What can we do to make it safer?” Besides just benefitting students, answering that question could help everyone – the school is next to a large park that’s a prime biking location.

Within the cycling community, one fundamental disagreement we have is with “vehicular cyclists.” This group believes bicyclists are the safest and best off when they act and are treated like cars by always taking the lane. While there are plenty of quiet, residential streets where that’s a fine approach, holding it as a philosophy on which to base infrastructure policy decisions is fundamentally incompatible with family biking. Parents who bike with their kids are already nervous enough, when both the American Pediatric Association and Consumer Reports emphatically state use a bike seat or trailer anywhere there might possibly be cars. So to expect parents to take the lane in streets with speed limits above 25 mph or that have stop-and-go traffic is unrealistic. Sticking to the slowest of streets may work for recreational rides, but there’s no way to ride for transportation without a busy road blocking your way, especially in the suburbs. Then of course, there’s the issue of what to do once kids get older. For kids to be able to ride to school or stores on their own bikes, we have to have places they can ride safely as well. If we want parents and children to ride for transportation, we have to provide infrastructure they are comfortable with, such as protected bike lanes and good, well-maintained multi-use paths. Neither on-road cycling or protected infrastructure are the be all end all of biking – rather, having both as viable options is important if we want to make family biking a reality.

Lastly, there’s a bit of a culture gap between the majority of biking advocates in D.C. proper and the suburban family biking crowd (all two of us). People who lead large group rides that attract young professionals don’t have a lot of advice for marketing to families or reaching out to schools. Folks who are used to dealing with biking infrastructure in the city aren’t as familiar with the suburbs’ opportunities (lots of space for protected bike lanes and multi-use paths!) and challenges (everything else). While these aren’t anyone’s fault, they’re another set of communication issues to work on.

Lately, I’ve been telling people that family biking is the “next big thing” for biking in America. But it can be lonely working on something just starting to get off of the ground. It was good to connect with my fellow Kidical Mass leaders to share frustrations and compare notes.

Family Biking O’Rama

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 4 Comments

As I’ve found out through my Kidical Mass rides, family biking is probably the toughest nut to crack when it comes to encouraging cycling for transportation. All of the usual barriers – being and feeling safe, having enough time to cycle, carrying needed gear – are exaggerated to the nth degree. Then there’s the sheer logistics of carrying kids on a bike, as well as the physical strength needed to drag that extra weight. So I was thrilled that the Washington Area Bicyclists’ Association, as part of their Women and Bikes initiative and promotion of Kidical Mass, held a Family Biking Workshop last weekend. Besides picking up some tips for my own use, I’d like to run a similar workshop for Kidical Mass Rockville in the future.

I was a little surprised when I showed up 10 minutes late and I was the first one there, but we ended up having a small crowd. Before the workshop, I had the chance to meet Megan, my counterpart for the DC Kidical Mass rides. She’s been doing both family riding and Kidical Mass rides much longer than I have, so I was eager to hear her insights. The President of WABA’s board also attended, who I’m sure is quite familiar with biking in general. But judging from the snoozing infant strapped to him in a baby carrier, family biking appeared to be quite new.

In her presentation, Megan ran through the many issues unique to family biking, including equipment, weather, napping and snacking. Both I and the general audience found the equipment section the most helpful. Although we have a trailer, I haven’t been the most satisfied with it. Because he can’t see anything, Sprout doesn’t like it, which eliminates most of the benefits of bringing him on recreational rides. It’s also very isolating for him – he can’t really hear me and once he starts talking, I won’t be able to hear him either. If we have a second kid, we’ll run out of space in the trailer and have to deal with two squirmy kids rather than one.

Megan from Kidical Mass D.C. shows off her Yuba cargo bike, with two kids seats, "monkey bars," panniers, and a rain cover.

Megan’s Yuba set-up, complete with rain cover and monkey bars

In contrast, Megan’s set-up appeared to solve my safety issues with bike seats while allowing her kids to enjoy the scenery. It also seemed more convenient than the trailer, which setting up is a multi-step process. She has a Yuba cargo bike fitted out with kid-friendly accessories. She has a bench-style seat for the older kid and a traditional bike seat for the younger one behind it. She had installed “monkey bars,” aluminum railings that encircle the back seat area. Along with providing a place for the older kid to hold on to, they also protect the kids from hitting the ground if the bike tips over. She also provided a perfect solution for my other issue with cargo bikes – that they don’t fit in our shed. Because she lives in an apartment, she stores her bike outside. To protect it from both the weather and prying eyes, she covers it with a motorcycle cover. It was a solution that was absurdly simple, but I would have never considered.

It will still be a couple of years before we switch out the trailer for a cargo bike, but the discussion definitely sparked my imagination. Especially because she said they’ve actually come out with better options since she bought hers, like the Xtracycle Edgerunner, which further minimizes the center-of-gravity issues.

Much of the equipment discussion centered around the options for electric-assist, which interested me a lot less. Because Chris is the main caretaker and not an avid cyclist, I suspect we’re never going to bike for transportation with Sprout enough to make it worth it. Similarly, I think that’s too much of a leap for most suburban families to even mention if I was to do a workshop in Rockville.

Other sections brought up a few different points I had never considered. On a bike, not only do you need to deal with the mess factor for snacking, but also the possibility of the snack gumming up your gears and wheels. Megan recommended Graham crackers as a healthy and safe option. We also discussed what age kids can start riding their own bikes. She recommended kids start on a balance bike between two and three years old. As I was planning on getting Sprout a balance bike for his next birthday, I think that will work out perfectly.

It’s easy to feel unusual for bringing little kids on bikes, even in the cycling advocacy community. So it was great to talk in person to other people sharing some of the same challenges. This was a bit of a test case, so I think the next time around we can attract even more participants. The D.C. area actually has the greatest density of Kidical Mass rides in the country, which in and of itself is quite an accomplishment.

It will take a lot of work to make sure the next generation has access to safe, useful bicycling infrastructure and is educated on how to use it. But engaging them and their parents while they are young is a good start.

Rolling Somewhat Merrily Along

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 2 Comments

When I started our town’s series of Kidical Mass bike rides for families, I was afraid no one would show up. Now that the summer has wound down and I’ve led four different rides, those fears have mostly been alleviated. But while I’ve had some success, the last two rides have shown that like many activist projects, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get a big impact. Fortunately, I’ve also had some little wins that give me hope.

Going into this project, I knew that my town’s bicycle culture lagged behind that of D.C. and Arlington. While we struggled to get 10 people for our community rides, they would get hundreds. Rockville has substantially improved its bike infrastructure and policies, but we just haven’t attracted the sheer numbers of cyclists yet. On top of that, getting families to cycle is the toughest nut to crack and suburban parents are notoriously paranoid about safety. This was illustrated quite clearly when the East Falls Church Kidical Mass launch ride (a specific neighborhood in Arlington) had 32 people, while ours had 17, including me, my husband, and the organizers of an existing ride.

On top of not having as much of a cycling culture, my town poses other logistical issues for Kidical Mass rides. Being in the suburbs, businesses are more spread out, making it difficult to find destinations within a few miles of a starting point that are also on quiet streets. From my experience so far, parents expect to drive rather than bike or take transit to the ride, so you need to start and end in the same place, preferably somewhere with good parking. As Rockville has a number of rolling hills that challenge adult cyclists, I usually abandoned the “flat” part of the “short, un-trafficked, flat” routes recommended for Kidical Mass rides.

Knowing all of this, it wasn’t too surprising that we only had one family each for our last two rides. We had some adult helpers on both, so neither group was ridiculously small, but we aren’t attracting the numbers that a ride that has “mass” in its name implies.

Despite the low turnout, certain aspects of each ride were encouraging. On the August ride, I had planned to ride from a local nature center to Rock Creek Park, a lush gem that runs from the heart of D.C. into Montgomery County. But the ride has some serious hills, so my heart sunk when I saw a little girl show up with training wheels. I especially felt bad when I realized she and her mom had showed up for the July ride but she was too scared to even leave the sidewalk. Trying to hide my nervousness, I encouraged her to try the ride and let her know that it was okay to walk the hills. Much to my relief, she defied everyone’s expectations. She made it up many of the hills and wasn’t ashamed of walking up others. The route offered exactly the right blend of achievable and just-out-of-reach challenge. We turned around before we reached the park, but I was so proud that she made it as far as she did. It was such a huge leap up from just a month before. Even though her mom kept saying, “If I had known the route, I would have never brought her!” it was clear that she was glad she did. Even though she was the only kid there, her accomplishment alone made the ride worthwhile.

On the ride this past weekend, I was quite surprised that anyone showed up, considering it was a 50% chance of rain. In fact, I actually left Chris and Sprout at home. But one family with two kids in a trailer and an older lady interested in volunteering both made an appearance. While the dad of the family was an avid cyclist, his wife was much less experienced. She had just gotten a new bike and self-identified as a rather slow cyclist. They had been doing rides around their neighborhood, but this was the first community ride they had done. And despite the rain, she loved it! Afterwards, she promised to sign up for another community ride this weekend as well as future Kidical Mass rides. On top of making it good experience for her, they’re also interested in purchasing a Yuba cargo bike to replace their trailer, which would be an awesome addition to our Kidical Mass rides.

Our next two rides are going to be with our sister ride in nearby Gaithersburg, which has been around for at least a year. I hope that some of their experience rubs off on us!

Kidical Mass Rockville Hits the Road

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Since I got pregnant, I’ve been thinking about how I would carry my baby on my bike. Biking is such a big part of my life that I couldn’t imagine giving it up or not including my kid in it. My research on family biking led me to Kidical Mass, a nationwide movement to encourage families to bike together, especially for transportation. While all of my bike volunteer group’s rides welcome younger cyclists, the idea of a ride for little ones where we wouldn’t have to worry about slowing everyone else down was appealing. Plus, I wanted to push back against the idea that new parents need to get a minivan and be even more auto-dependent than ever. As I was extremely pregnant when I first found out about Kidical Mass, there was no way I could organize it that season. (The thought of a bicycle seat immediately postpartum is pretty horrifying.) But I committed to organize Rockville’s first series of Kidical Mass rides this summer. This past weekend, I finally made good on my promise and found out if Rockville is ready for family biking or not!

As the spring season approached, I got serious about planning the rides: picking dates, putting it in our town’s recreation guide, writing press releases, pitching blog posts, and posting it to as many social media outlets as possible. For our first ride, I decided to start at one of our community centers and ride to a local ice cream parlor and back. At only 1.5 miles each way using multi-use paths, residential streets and a short hop on a bike lane, I figured the route was low-key enough for even fairly small munchkins to participate.

Unfortunately, I was terrified that my suburb – which most people in the area know for a huge multi-lane state highway – just wasn’t going to have the interest. While we’re actually pretty bike-friendly (Bronze level), but most people don’t realize that. Plus, suburban parents have a stereotype of being tied to their cars and overprotective of their children. Lastly, I have a history of events with mixed results. Often the ones I work the hardest on organizing have the worst turnout, so I was nervous I was going to create all of this hype for nothing.

Then the Kidical Mass DC organizer pitched our story to a reporter at WTOP, the D.C. area’s major news radio station. After quite a bit of phone tag, we finally had our phone interview. While I tried to stay on my talking points as much as possible, good little communications person that I am, I think I still rambled a little. Catching the interview on Friday morning, I actually punched the air, even though she did chose one of my more inane and vaguely defensive quotes. (In response to a question about safety: “I bike more cautiously with my baby in a trailer and I’m a pretty cautious bicyclist anyway.” So much for good sound bites.)

After the reporter told me that the interview was going to air during the next morning’s drive time, the opposite fear struck me – what if we had too many people? What if I had a bunch of little kids on bikes whom I couldn’t keep together and safe? The response to my panicked email to my volunteer group didn’t allay my fears, as everyone was either traveling or leading other bikey activities. Chris said he could sweep (stay in the back of the group and keep everyone together), but with his relative lack of biking experience, I hated putting him in that position.

When I woke up the day of the ride, I thought, “Thank God the weather is cooperating.” The sky was blue, and the temperature was blessedly low for DC in June. The wind was a bit strong, but it provided some nice cooling power. We hustled to get Sprout, the snacks and our baby gear in the trailer so we would have plenty of time to pedal over to the community center. The fact that we had to skip Sprout’s morning nap provided me with one more reason to worry, as I didn’t want him crying while I was leading the ride! Despite the breeze, incredible weight of the trailer, a broken traffic light, and me jumping a gear, we managed to get there a few minutes early. I breathed a sigh of relief at that at small mercy.

My nerves began to calm as people showed up toting small children in trailers and on their own bikes. Overall, six families with 17 people in total showed up! While most of the kids were in trailers, there were 3 little ones on their own bikes, along with two older kids. Much to my relief, the leader of our sister ride Kidical Mass Gaithersburg showed up and was willing to sweep. I gave a brief safety talk, we took a group photo and then we were off!

Kidical Mass Rockville launch ride

Or least off the curb. I cycled into the community center’s parking lot, only to find out there was no curb cut back to the trail. With some effort, I hauled my bike and the trailer up to the trail while everyone waited for me. Not an auspicious start.

Then, we had a few abrupt drop-outs. Waiting for everyone to cross the road less than a quarter-mile into the ride, I noticed our sweep had arrived but our group was noticeably smaller. We actually lost two families! In one of the families, the dad was on a bikeshare bike and the two girls were older, so they may have decided the ride was too slow and going to take too long for their taste. The little girl with the other family kept saying before the ride that she was going to ride on the sidewalk, so the large road crossing may have scared her. The Gaithersburg Kidical Mass guy said that dropouts occasionally happen to them as well – people’s expectations don’t always match the ride, even when you describe it well.

Thankfully, the rest of the ride went much more smoothly. The two kids on their own bikes were a hoot. They were up front with me for much of the ride and pumped up the rather substantial hill. The little girl kept yelling, “These hills are going to make our legs soooo strong! Strong legs!” Indeed. The little boy was equally as enthusiastic, although a bit of a danger to himself. I had to remind him multiple times to stay behind me. He took that direction as literally as possible, riding so close that he almost ran into the back of the trailer a couple times. While it was frustrating, these rides are designed to teach kids how to ride safely on the road, so teaching him proper etiquette was important.

My favorite part of the ride was hearing both of the kids say, “This was awesome!” While they liked the ice cream, they actually seemed to enjoy the ride itself the most. Cultivating a love of bicycling is so rewarding; I was glad to be part of that joy.

Sprout did pretty well this time around too. He didn’t fuss in the trailer and enjoyed hanging out at the ice cream place’s patio. He actually fell asleep on the way home, his head tilted to the side, weighed down by the helmet. A bit uncomfortable most likely, but otherwise a good reward for a job well-done.

Join Me for the Launch of Kidical Mass Rockville!

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

Are you a Metro DC local? Do you like biking? Do you have or know kids who like riding their own bikes or mooching effort off of adults on bikes? If so, I invite you to participate in the very first Rockville Kidical Mass ride this Saturday at 10 am at Thomas Farm Community Center in Rockville. I will be the Pied Piper leading kiddos and their families not to doom, but rather to the much more pleasant prospect of ice cream.

Unlike the community rides I’ve lead in the past, this one is designed very specifically to target families with little kids. The route is only 3 miles long with a stop in the middle. Kids of all ages and abilities are invited to participate and we will ride at the pace of the slowest rider. (Even if that’s very, very slow.)

Kidical Mass – yes, bike geeks, it’s a play off of the Critical Mass rides – is a nationwide movement to get families on bicycles for transportation and recreation. While most Kidical Mass rides are in cities, there’s an increasing number in suburban areas, including the D.C. Metro area. With D.C., Arlington, Alexandria, Falls Church, and Gaithersburg all hosting ones already, Rockville will bring the local total to six different regular rides.

I’ll be leading Kidical Mass rides in Rockville every second Saturday at 10 AM. To get more details on the other Rockville Kidical Mass rides throughout the summer, check out our blog. To find out about all of the other great community rides the Rockville Bicycle Advisory Committee is leading, check out our website, Facebook page, or Meetup Group.

Help make biking in Rockville cuter – join the Kidical Mass movement!