Yesterday the Michigan Trails and Greenways Alliance (MTGA) was awarded a $15,000 grant from REI and Bikes Belong. The grant is to help MTGA and the city of Detroit earn Bicycle Friendly Community recognition from the League of  American Bicyclists. As part of the award, the League is also providing technical support.

MTGA was one of only five groups to receive this award, which was announced at the National Bike Summit yesterday in Washington DC.

As we’ve noted earlier, the Bicycle Friendly Community evaluation isn’t well suited for shrinking cities like Detroit, which also rely heavily on public-private partnerships. This should be an excellent opportunity to work with the League on making the application better fit Detroit.

It was a bit of surprise seeing a Google booth at the National Bike Summit.   They are here to announce biking directions on Google Maps. This is a nice complement to the driving, walking, and public transit directions.

The routing algorithm doesn’t shy away from routing cyclists on some main roads, like Woodward Avenue. Perhaps we can use this as another reason to make Metro Detroit’s streets more bike friendly.

One major issue: Google is showing sidepaths/wide sidewalks as legitimate bicycling facilities when they are not according to national design guidelines. This makes us think SEMCOG may have provided this data to Google. Despite our comments against doing so, SEMCOG included sidepaths/wide sidewalks as bicycle facilities maps. We’ll bring this issue up with Google.

Here’s part of the announcement from the League of American Bicyclists:

This new feature includes: step-by-step bicycling directions; bike trails outlined directly on the map; and a new “Bicycling” layer that indicates bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly roads. The directions feature provides step-by-step, bike-specific routing suggestions – similar to the directions provided by our driving, walking, or public transit modes. Simply enter a start point and destination and select “Bicycling” from the drop-down menu. You will receive a route that is optimized for cycling, taking advantage of bike trails, bike lanes, and bike-friendly streets and avoiding hilly terrain whenever possible.

Visit http://maps.google.com/biking to try out this new feature. Biking directions for Google Maps is currently in Beta.

The National Bike Summit in Washington DC begins this evening. I will be attending as MTGA’s Detroit Greenways Coordinator, along with Kelli Kavanaugh from the Wheelhouse Detroit, Mike Reuter from American Cycle and Fitness, John Waterman from PEAC, and others.

I hope to do some live blogging from the event, but that’s going to be a challenge given the very busy schedule.

I will provide one teaser. Yesterday I received the following invitation from Andy Clarke, president of the League of American Bicyclists, the group organizing this summit.

I would be honored if you would join special National Bike Summit guests for Lunch on Wednesday, March 10. Please take your seat at the ENVIRONMENT table near the podium.

All I can say at this point is its some more good news for biking in Detroit.

– Todd Scott

In a unanimous vote, the Ann Arbor City Council eliminated their bike registration ordinance according to the Ann Arbor Chronicle. According to the Chronicle, the current registration ordinance wasn’t working.

At a February meeting of the council — in the context of discussions on a possible revision to the registration program, as well as a revision to all the city’s ordinances on bicycling — Carsten Hohnke (Ward 5) had reported that the registration program had in recent years, not resulted in the return of stolen bicycles to their owners. The return of stolen bicycles to their owners is an often-cited benefit of the program.

Specifically, Hohnke had said that from September of 2007 to the present, 39 stolen bikes had been recovered and returned to their owners — but in none of those cases had the bicycle registration program been instrumental. The return of those bicycles had been the result of regular police work.

The city staff is apparently looking at a new and improved bike registration ordinance, though it’s unclear why they would if the police have not needed it to return stolen bicycles.

Popular Science magazine recently put all of their archived issues on-line. A quick search for bicycles brought up this interesting article from July 1936.

The bicycle is back. Four millions Americans now pedal along streets and highways. And, last year factories in the United States turned out 750,000 machines, nearly equaling the peak production of the gay nineties. News items from all part of the country tell the story of this dramatic boom in popularity.

Bike polo. Bike rental stations. Trains on bikes. The bicycle news of 1936 wasn’t all that different than today.

And, they note that Detroit has created “handlebar paths” for bicyclists in several city parks. We’re guessing that included Belle Isle and Rouge Park.

The article also documents the rise of bicycles starting in 1885 and their subsequent fall by 1904. The depression spurred Americans to rediscover this “forgotten vehicle.”

That sounds similar to what has happened during our gas price spikes and tough economy.