Tonight the Madison City Council will have the Mayor’s Platinum Bicycling Committee Report introduced.

Full disclosure, I wrote the report…but I was just the scribe. I think this committee was unique in that there was a great deal of interaction between the bicycle enthusiast citizen committee members, city staff, and the public. As a result, the ideas initiated from a broad group of individuals and a fair amount of discussion happened about the challenges of implementation.

There are nearly 100 recommendations in this report, and a fairly long introduction that seeks to explain “the whys” of proposing all these ideas. I’ll give you the Cliff notes:

1. Biking is good…and for lots and lots of reasons.

2. In order to get people to bike more, it will take a combination of infrastructure (roads, paths, and other built stuff), land use planning (policies, like the ones that will some day come out of the new Capital Area Regional Plan Commission or CARPC ), enforcement (that’s the cops), education and outreach, and political will (somebody’s got to make it happen).

This report and its recommendations will likely be criticized by some as a waste of time and money, or perhaps as unrealistic. People are welcome to those opinions, of course.

This report represents something, though. It represents a dream. It’s hard not to conjure up the image of a man who had a dream on this, the day after Martin Luther King, Jr Day. Maybe it’s cheesy, but I still think that the only way to make the world a better place is to dream, and to back those dreams up with actions. I believe, and so do a small but growing group of people, that the bicycle is a key component in making the world a better place. This is a simple idea about a simple, but elegant, machine. This report provides a vision for creating positive change in our community. This is a bike map for how to make Madison a better place to live. Money is involved and compromises and changes will happen along the way, but there is hope in this document that can be translated into a better tomorrow.

And I don’t know about everyone else, but I’m ready for a little hope.

[photo by Della Haugen]