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Moakley Park gets a spot where kids can learn to ride a bike
By adamg on Thu, 08/22/2024 - 5:16pm
Photo via the mayor's office.
The city today formally opened a "bike town" at Moakley Park in South Boston aimed at giving kids a way to safely learn how to ride a bike in an urban setting.
Looking like a giant version of those road mats you can get for little kids (UHub affiliate link), Boston's first bike town will let kids get more comfortable riding a bike, even in a big city:
Bike towns are small-sized street networks, often with scaled-down traffic features, designed to teach children how to safely navigate urban street systems and increase their overall confidence in bike riding.
This is just the first bike town planned for Boston. Using a grant from Children's Hospital, the city also plans to put down a similar area for young bike riders at Ross Playground in Hyde Park, with a third park to be named later.
Neighborhoods:
Free tagging:
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Comments
Total fail
Where's the Uber and delivery trucks parked in the lanes? How are the kids ever going to learn how to avoid the driver on a phone who drifts from side to side before suddenly swerving to the curb? Without any traffic lights, how can the kids learn how to deal with the car that makes a sharp right turn without using their signal?
/S
(Seriously, nice effort.)
open-ended lesson
Who gets to play traffic cop?
Parents?
And I hope those kids with Power Wheels toy cars get to play here, too. They can add the missing element.
Practice makes slightly better.
Practice taking turns at 4-way stops is good practice.
Not to mention masked men on
Not to mention masked men on motor scooters standing in the bike lane, speeding along in the bike lane, filtering around cars on the left and right, going the wrong direction, popping on and off sidewalks. I loathe the fact that the immoral companies like Uber and their ilk incentivize bad, uncivil behavior, but the delivery truck and non-commercial drop off issue isn’t so simple as there is simply no alternative to a give and take.
At least the EEE risk level is still low for that area, unlike the critical areas in the state. See Oxford.
https://www.mass.gov/info-details/massachusetts-arbovirus-update
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/08/21/metro/oxford-board-health-recomme...
Sequela may be a fate worse than death.
Gateway drug
This is how it starts.
Next thing you know, they're cycling to school, cycling to the park, cycling to their friends' homes. Hell, they could ride to the Esplanade and get hooked on sailing!
I remember, as a little kid, along with a bunch of friends, riding to a city park that was two towns away from us. I would love to see that kind of adventure get normalized again.
Also good for ...
Quad skating
lol
I had carpeting like this in a bedroom as a child.
I never thought to ride my bike in my bedroom tho.
Edit: I just went to find a picture of the old carpet I had.. and uh.. this design for this 'park' is a copy of a rug design I found.
https://www.amazon.com/Kids-Carpet-Playmat-Extra-Large/dp/B07D3FC1Q6
I also think Adam meant to link to this above, but instead it is to a Taylor Swift video.
Thats embarassing
Adam is a swifty?
Aw, is your masculinity hurting?
No, not a Swiftie, but I do like some of her songs.
In any case, that was not really a pure Swift song. It was a bit of "Trouble" in which her singing "ohhhh" is replaced with screaming goats. Came up in a chat with a friend about who might be the special guest star at the DNC tonight and, oy, obviously when I went to then find a "city mat" on Amazon and copy that link, I didn't hit control-C hard enough or something, so I wound up pasting the YouTube video of Swift and screaming goats into my story instead. Fixed.
Not just any Swift song
Well played, though.
We had one for our kids
One of whom was born with a dark sense of humor (wonder where he got that?).
I came into the play area one day and he had a car on it's side and a truck on its side at odd angles to the road.
A TV truck was already set up ... and the ambulance was still some distance away at the far corner.
He was about 5 years old.
Kids
What about the majority of adults who cant ride a bike. I see practice stop signed. very helpful!
lol
I'm sorry but all I can do is laugh as I imagine the state of high dudgeon in which this sparkling syntactical gem was pounded out of your keyboard.
That’s cute. When biking with
That’s cute. When biking with a child old enough to bike on a roadway do you bike in back so you can keep an eye on them and give verbal commands, and so you can catch up and stop them, or to you bike in front and hope they keep in line? I did both. Also, today there was a lot of horns and jerky, aggressive driving.
Depends on the kid
Depends on the kid, but I think both are useful. I remember as a kid finding it helpful to have someone to follow (and I've also found adult riders who are new to riding in traffic have found it helpful -- I've had several ask to follow me on their first time commuting, and it appears to be very helpful, both instructive and confidence-building. Riding behind, as you say, has the obvious advantage that you can see them. I have two concerns about riding behind: one that the kid can't hear you (which you can solve by teaching them to respond "OK" or "Got it" to confirm they heard and understood). The other is that the kid turns their head to see you or hear you, jerks the handlebars, and...you get the idea.
I'm a big fan of practicing some of these skills somewhere away from traffic but where you can practice the verbal communication and some basic skills -- something like an empty parking lot. Bring along some sidewalk chalk or something else that you can use to mark off "streets", or if the lot is bounded by a curb, you can just use the perimeter and make that your "road". Once you and the kid are both confident and comfortable, then try it on the road (and pick your time and place to better the odds of a positive, non-scary experience).
Yeah, that's a thing that happens all too often. Unless you want to confine the kid to so-called bike trails (which have their own dangers) or a suburban cul de sac, at some point you have to learn to deal with those -- but you have to judge when the kid is ready. Biking should be an activity that is fun and that builds their feeling of independence and self-sufficiency, not something that traumatizes them. There's no shame in limiting yourself to "safer" environments until the kid is ready, however long that takes.
I rode behind them
There were a couple of reasons for this. Supervision being one of them. Being a bigger body on a taller bike being a big one, too.
While this looks like a fun
While this looks like a fun spot for the training wheels set the only reasonable place to learn how to ride a bike is in an empty parking lot.