The blitz of bike sales on the Vineyard described in this week’s edition portends a busy season for cyclists on Island roads, so extra caution is critical.

This is for the young cowboy who drives eastward on South Road mornings between 6 and 6:30, speeding: You will have noticed, perhaps, that I don’t go that way anymore. You win. A car always does, against a bicycle.

Thank you to the Tisbury police department and officer in the school, Scott Ogden, for an amazing Bike Rodeo at the Tisbury School on Saturday, June 15. Dozens of students came with their families and passed the safety course. Many received new helmets donated by the police department along with free backpacks, hotdogs and hamburgers cooked by their principal John Custer.

A new report released this week by the Martha’s Vineyard Commission lays out an ambitious plan to fill in the gaps in the network of bike paths that runs through the three up-Island towns to create a continuous loop with better access to downtown areas while avoiding dangerous intersections like Five Corners in Vineyard Haven.

Forks in a Rural Road

There are deepening divisions on Chappaquiddick over whether a bike path should be built on the tiny rural island that lies off the extreme eastern end of Edgartown. Indeed, the debate over the Chappy bike path has continued for more than thirty years, but the discussion has taken on more urgency in recent months and weeks and landed in front of the Edgartown selectmen again.

Early Summer Tragedy

Between 1987 and 2004 there were five fatal bicycle accidents on the Vineyard, according to Gazette records. On Tuesday this week one more was added to the archives and today’s edition is unmistakably colored by sadness as it carries the news of the death of Dina Dececca, age forty, who died in a horrific accident on State Road in Vineyard Haven while riding her bicycle on a day trip to the Island early Tuesday afternoon.

As a cyclist, I am sadly accustomed to abuse, including ignorant and aggressive drivers (thankfully rare on the Vineyard), so-called bike paths that are substandard in design and upkeep, and the overall attitude (despite law to the contrary) that I’m a second-class road user. Even here in Edgartown, the town has put up illegal stop signs on the bike paths (and ignored pleas to remove them), and illegally tries to exclude cyclists from a section of Pease’s Point Way (a ham-fisted response to a fatality some years back).