Commissioners back bike trail

By: Jim Mcnally | Mooresville Tribune
Published: March 18, 2010

In the late 1970s, the rock band Queen tried to get a two-wheel riding craze started when they released the song "Bicycle Race."
The song repeats the line "I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike" over and over.
At Tuesday night's Iredell County Commissioners meeting, bicycle enthusiasts showed up to make the same point regarding an ambitious multi-county bike trail being proposed by the North Carolina Department of Transportation.
About a dozen supporters of the Lake Norman Region Bicycle Plan were in the audience at the meeting and three of them spoke to the commissioners in an effort to get them to see the value in the county's endorsement of the proposal.
The issue was actually on Tuesday's agenda in two different places.
Bill Galloway, of Troutman, spoke during the "appoints before the board" segment of the meeting and told of his many two-wheeled adventures throughout the country and the state.
Among other of his rides, Galloway talked about the eight times he has participated in the Cycle North Carolina "Mountains to the Coast" ride, which has made stops in Statesville a few times including the ride last fall.
Galloway said the bike trail would not only be beneficial for bicyclists, but could also be economically beneficial to the four counties (and five municipalities) it courses through.
"I'm not sure how big of an impact the Lake Norman Bike Trail will have," Galloway said. "But I'm sure it will be a positive one."
Jeff Archer and Bjorn Hansen spoke when the trail plan was put before the board for its endorsement.
Archer, the owner of the First Flight Bicycle store in Statesville, said biking has a multitude of benefits.
He pointed out that that in 1964, when 50 percent of children rode their bicycles to school, the childhood obesity rate was only 12 percent. By 2004, Archer said, only 3 percent of children were riding their their bicycles to school and the obesity rate had risen by 45 percent.
As a consequence of this, Archer said, the average weight of 6-year-old in the United States has risen by 11 pounds in the last half-century.
Archer said that a car puts out a good portion of its pollutants in the earliest part of a trip and that many of the trips people make in cars are of two miles or less.
He said that only 1 percent of Americans use their bicycles for actual travel purposes and that if that number rose by just a half-percent, the country could save more than 460 million gallons of gasoline per year.
Hansen, a planner with the Centralina Council of Governments, has been working on the project for NCDOT and promoting it to the municipalities impacted by it.
He told the board that the plan does not call for the county to spend any money on the trail.
He said 46 miles of the trail would ultimately be in Iredell County.
The entire trail will will be nearly 139 miles long when complete. In addition to Iredell, it will run through Catawba, Lincoln and Mecklenburg counties.
At the March 2 board meeting, the matter of endorsing the trail was tabled but not before Commissioner Steve Johnson spoke out against the spending of money on it.
At Tuesday's meeting, Johnson said he was not against the trail, per se, but still took the opportunity to take a jab at the North Carolina General Assembly.
"I'll be polite to the people in Raleigh and say that the state legislators are highly incompetent," Johnson said. "That's about as nice as I can put it."
Johnson then made a motion to approve a resolution that endorses the Lake Norman Bicycle Plan.
It passed by a 4-0 vote.

Commissioners back bike trail

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