It’s spring and time to take to the road. But instead of hitting the fossil fuels, use your legs as gas. In other words, jump into Bike Week, happening all over Massachusetts next week.
Here on the Vineyard, Phil Hughes from Wheel Happy Too is joining the YMCA’s after-school prgram on Monday, May 15, at 3:45 p.m. to give a presentation on the importance of proper bike etiquette. The event is for children ages five to eleven.
For more details, call 508-696-7171, extenion 108 or visit ymcamv.org.
A few weeks ago I went on a bike trip to Woods Hole with a group from The Anchors in Edgartown. We rode the bike path to North Falmouth and back, a pretty ride past a stretch of beach and a varied landscape of woods, fields and cranberry bog. As I pedaled along, shifting my 18 gears, a helmet planted firmly on my head, I remembered my first trip to Martha’s Vineyard. I arrived then on a three-speed Raleigh with an army surplus saddlebag slung over the rear fender and nothing but hair on my head.
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).
Less than two months after earning rights to share the new
Martha's Vineyard Skatepark, bikers are once again being told to
keep out.
The reversal came Monday night during an emotional parks department
meeting moments after commissioners heard pleas from teenage bikers
anxious to stay in the park. In the end, commissioners bowed to the
advice of Oak Bluffs' insurance agent and town counsel to ban
bikers.
It was built for skateboarders after a grassroots effort that lasted
years, but less than three months after the Martha's Vineyard
Skatepark opened in Oak Bluffs, the skaters are dealing with some
uninvited guests - bicyclists.
Over 400 cyclists participated in Ride The Vineyard 2024 to raise money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.
