By Spencer Sterritt

GoByBike Weeks helping cyclists hit the trail during gloomy winter days

Oct 15, 2018 | 4:04 PM

NANAIMO — The days are getting shorter and the skies less sunny, but a turn in the weather doesn’t mean you have to stop biking everywhere.

For the next two weeks, the City is promoting GoByBike Weeks, an evolution of the provincial Bike to Work Week program. Instead of focusing on cycling just to work, the City is promoting cycling for everything. Whether it’s hitting the bike path to work or for small errands, transportation manager Jamie Rose said they want to see more people pumping the pedals rather than pumping the brakes.

“If you can skip a five-minute car ride for a 10-minute bike ride, you get a little bit of fresh air, you’re not having to search for parking and it’s overall a huge benefit to people and the community.”

From today, Oct. 15 to Oct. 28, cyclists can visit five stations along bike routes to get informed about what it takes to cycle in the fall and winter and how to be prepared for whatever Mother Nature throws at them.

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“We’re really trying to provide people with the infrastructure and support to make it enjoyable and fun to ride to the grocery store, the coffee shop, to vote. There’s lots of opportunities where it might not take a whole lot more time to bike than it would to drive.”

Promoting cycling and more active methods of transportation is a key part of the City’s transportation master plan, which examined how the City is likely to expand in coming decades and build on such developments.

“We want to get people shifting into a more sustainable and active lifestyle,” Rose said. “We want to start adding infrastructure that will encourage people to walk and bike whenever possible.”

He said positive feed back from their Estevan Rd. project, which made significant changes to accessibility, received a significant amount of support from cyclists and those who wish to bike more often.

“We’ve trimmed the road down, put in big landscape medians and bike lanes. If we can create more corridors like that, a lot of people are going to see the appeal in shifting over to bikes.”

You can register for the GoByBike program online here.

spencer@nanaimonewsnow.com

On Twitter: @spencer_sterrit