It's Bike to Work Day: Whose Road is it Anyway?

For lots of cyclists, Bike to Work Day is a celebration, and a chance to share their experience, knowledge and stretch of pavement with newbies who may have been thinking about commuting to work by bike, but had reservations about venturing out on the roadways.

But for drivers, it may be a dashboard-pounding day spent behind packs of riders who seem to relish irritating the car-bound commuter. 

Does it really have to be this way? Darien Manley, Chief of the Maryland National Capital Park Police, doesn't think so.

He'd like to see us ditch the 'share the road' approach. He says that implies that one user does, in fact, own the road. Instead, Manley says the emphasis should be on sharing the responsibility of creating safe roads. Manley also says the focus should be on our own behavior and willingness to follow the rules of the road. We need to exercise common sense as well as common courtesy, he says.

And the change of attitude may be needed more than ever, as the pressure to create more bike-friendly communities appears to grow. Montgomery County just hosted a conference on bicycling 'For the Rest of Us' --the title of the conference indicating the understanding that biking shouldn't be restricted to those brave enough to take to the often-congested roads. While DC has miles of bike lanes (Georgetown now sports a  bike lane on 34th Street) the suburbs --built for cars--struggle to retrofit in an era of tight budgets. 

Numbers may drive the change. Shane Farthing, with the Washington Area Bicyclist Association, says more than 10,600 people registered to take part in Bike to Work Day. And it's not an us-versus-them thing. Farthing points out much of the organization's membership lives in the DC suburbs. And those members don't just ride bikes, they drive too.