Biking the Community

The feeling of freedom is the wind rushing against your face and the sights as you travel by them. This is what the community bike rides are working to pass along to the UTA community with their weekly rides every Friday.  

These bike rides build friendship, community and confidence as riders explore the UTA campus and lesser traveled routes around the Arlington area. 

Morgan Chivers, the Makers Literacies librarian, stated that the weekly rides have a mixture of people of all different skill levels. Anyone is welcome to come out to participate. 

“We gather every Friday at 4:30 p.m. at the Central Library and take a five-to-10-mile ride around the campus and the surrounding area. Every month, we do a different route,” Morgan said. “The last Friday of the month is when we start the new route. We celebrate that new route by doing the loop and going out to eat together, which is not mandatory.” 

Morgan stated that riding together in a group helps to build up the confidence of cyclists who may not have ridden on public streets before. The rides also seek to educate motorists to share the road and keep an eye out for bicycles. 

“Biking is fun, and it is good to get people more familiar with it,” Morgan said. “We have some people on the ride that are very accomplished and perfectly comfortable riders, but we have others that are just learning how to shift the gears on their bike.” 

Morgan said one of the steps they are taking in these community bike rides is to teach good strategies and ridership habits. These lessons will help a person use a bike safely in an urban environment. 

The routes on the rides show different alternatives to what a person would typically take in a car. They offer other options that cyclists can use to reach their destination, including taking a side street rather than a main arterial road. 

Morgan stated that as UTA continues to grow, the need for alternate means of transportation due to traffic, parking, and rising enrollment becomes even more significant. 

So, if you want to build up your cycling skills, take a fun ride around campus or make new friends, stop by the UTA Central Library on Friday afternoons. The ride kicks off at 4:30 p.m. in front of the Central Library.