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Go ride a bike
By John Torgersen
Special to the Times
Ever watch the expression on the face of a child riding their bicycle along on of Katy’s many greenway trails or bike paths? It’s pure joy.
Take a look at a passing adult on that same trail, and the expression is more likely to be one of determined weariness; adults mainly use the trails for exercise, kids use them as personal pathways to explore their expanding world.
An adult view of the world is one where it is the roads that serve as navigational guides, and convenient links between places of interest, helping us organize our lives on a sort of Google Maps view of the world from above.
To our children, roads are scary, off limits places that separate them from all the places that they would like to go: a friend’s house, the playground, the ice cream store; all are unreachable by someone who can’t use in the streets.
When you show your children how to use your local greenway trail or bike path, you open up the world to them, because to children of bicycle age, bike paths are magic highways that seem to be built just for them.
That’s why they smile as they ride.
Bike paths connect the disparate parts of a child’s world into a coherent whole, and are often a child’s start to the important move from exploring the backyard to exploring their community.
Later, as you allow your children to take their first ride over to a friend’s house all by themselves, you can be thankful that the trails provide them the opportunity to do so safely.
When you see them beaming as they ride back into the driveway later that day, you know that they have achieved a great milestone in their personal development; they have wheels, and with them the freedom that they will need, in appropriate, graduated steps, to help them to develop into responsible young adults.
Sooner or later, those same steps are bound to take them outside the confines of you subdivision. It’s part of growing up.
While there are many well thought out and nicely executed trails in Katy’s subdivisions, the different subdivisions plans don’t yet fit together into an overall scheme that allows us to use them as efficient transportation for short local trips around our larger community.
The question we have to ask is: is your community your subdivision? Or is it Katy? If it’s to be Katy, then we have work to do to better integrate our subdivisions.
While the price of gasoline has come down recently, we all know that eventually it will head back up, and it would make sense from an economic, health and environmental standpoint for all of us to make greater use of the greenways and bike trails.
Today the bike trails are pleasant interludes to escape from a busy life, and a great place to exercise, but they could be an integral part of our transportation system, and help us bring the disparate parts of Katy closer together.
We should find the resources to integrate the existing bike trails into a network that connects our community.
Perhaps if we did, then we adults can get back that joy the kids feel when they ride the bike trails, and smile a little more.
Take a look at a passing adult on that same trail, and the expression is more likely to be one of determined weariness; adults mainly use the trails for exercise, kids use them as personal pathways to explore their expanding world.
An adult view of the world is one where it is the roads that serve as navigational guides, and convenient links between places of interest, helping us organize our lives on a sort of Google Maps view of the world from above.
To our children, roads are scary, off limits places that separate them from all the places that they would like to go: a friend’s house, the playground, the ice cream store; all are unreachable by someone who can’t use in the streets.
When you show your children how to use your local greenway trail or bike path, you open up the world to them, because to children of bicycle age, bike paths are magic highways that seem to be built just for them.
That’s why they smile as they ride.
Bike paths connect the disparate parts of a child’s world into a coherent whole, and are often a child’s start to the important move from exploring the backyard to exploring their community.
Later, as you allow your children to take their first ride over to a friend’s house all by themselves, you can be thankful that the trails provide them the opportunity to do so safely.
When you see them beaming as they ride back into the driveway later that day, you know that they have achieved a great milestone in their personal development; they have wheels, and with them the freedom that they will need, in appropriate, graduated steps, to help them to develop into responsible young adults.
Sooner or later, those same steps are bound to take them outside the confines of you subdivision. It’s part of growing up.
While there are many well thought out and nicely executed trails in Katy’s subdivisions, the different subdivisions plans don’t yet fit together into an overall scheme that allows us to use them as efficient transportation for short local trips around our larger community.
The question we have to ask is: is your community your subdivision? Or is it Katy? If it’s to be Katy, then we have work to do to better integrate our subdivisions.
While the price of gasoline has come down recently, we all know that eventually it will head back up, and it would make sense from an economic, health and environmental standpoint for all of us to make greater use of the greenways and bike trails.
Today the bike trails are pleasant interludes to escape from a busy life, and a great place to exercise, but they could be an integral part of our transportation system, and help us bring the disparate parts of Katy closer together.
We should find the resources to integrate the existing bike trails into a network that connects our community.
Perhaps if we did, then we adults can get back that joy the kids feel when they ride the bike trails, and smile a little more.
Carson wrote on Nov 19, 2008 10:02 AM: