“A city is how people are feeling.”
Carlos Moreno, “The 15-Minute City”
Bicycle Utopia’s mission is to provide people with enjoyable ways to connect with their city, and share their enjoyment with others. We believe the way to do this is not through words, but through actions.
Take a moment for yourself. Visit a park, visit a museum, go to a bookstore, and rest your legs at an eatery with a drink or a snack, and a chat with a friend. We made these maps to help you do just that.
When your self-care includes biking, you are naturally, organically caring for others at the same time. When you ride a bike, you make the city air healthier to breathe, for everyone. Biking has the effect of slowing car traffic, making city streets safer, for everyone. And when you bike, you support the city’s economy: bicyclists spend more in local businesses than wither motorists or pedestrians.
Most of all, what bicyclists do for the community is create an atmosphere of mutual aid, trust and appreciation for each other. We live in a time of heightened social conflict, due to rapid, global technological, economic and political change. We’re all struggling to find our place in a context that requires constant adaptation to the new, and questioning of the old. Can we keep this? Is this thing, this idea, this self-image useful and relevant in the new normal? An atmosphere of uncertainty pervades our daily lives: about who we are, and who we are to each other.
But within all that, whenever anybody gets on a bike, they are making a statement of trust, and expressing faith in the best intentions of the strangers around them. The bicyclist, simply by rolling out into traffic, is saying “I know that the other people are looking out for me on this street, just as I am looking out for them. I’m confident that I will get to my destination safe and sound.”
This is the great gift that bicycling gives us, and we give to each other. Our myriad journeys are all, in the end, headed for the same destination, the future.
One way and another, we are getting there together.
Welcome to Bicycle Utopia.