Friday, July 4 was the third monthly appearance for Bike North Penn at Lansdale First Fridays. These have been fantastic opportunities to engage with attendees. Not only have we been able to promote our community rides and explain our efforts for infrastructure improvements, like bike lanes on Broad Street, but we have also been able to hear the ideas and concerns from a broad spectrum of the community.

Here are some of our understandings coming from these engagements:

• There is broad support for bike lanes on Broad Street and an interest in making the North Penn area generally safer for biking. We collected about another 30 additional signatures at the August First Friday from Lansdale Borough residents and could have collected another 30 from people from other municipalities (current petition is for Lansdale Borough residents only)
• We did also talk to a very small number of people who were against bike lanes. We gave these folks time to explain their positions and provide some counter arguments. Most of them boiled down to the opinion that it is not save for bikers to add bike lanes – but of course, their are already people riding South Broad and other major roads without even a defined space that a simple bike lane would provide. I don’t know that we changed any minds, but it is always good to engage on these issues.
• Our community rides, with typical distances of 6-8 miles and casual speeds appeals to many people who are not regular bikers. People also like to idea of getting out and riding in larger groups for safety and confidence. So we will continue to program these types of community rides and try to increase their frequency when we can.
• There is a lot of interest and confusion about the local trails for biking – where they are, when they will be built out and connected and where they can take you. We will try to do a better job of posting this info in the Bike North Penn web site and making sure local governments are aware of this interest so trails can be prioritized in context of other local infrastructure projects.