Cycling: The No-Pollute Commute

Think of bicyclists and perhaps you think of young, tattooed men with pierced lips and noses. Not so in San Francisco, where Leah Shahum, Executive Director of the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, has helped transform the image of cyclists, and turned cycling into an accepted form of commuting to work. Peddle along any bicycle lane on any weekday morning, and you are sure to be joined by men in suits and women in skirts, heading to their jobs as lawyers, computer programmers, or—as in my case—teachers.

Shahum notes that there are compelling environmental reasons to bicycle to work. “Bicycling is the no pollute commute,” she says. “A lot of people are bicycling because they want to help.”

But as an advocate for San Francisco’s bicycle community, she is most attuned to quality of life issues. “Bicycling makes San Francisco a better place,” she says. “Bicycling makes the city a safer, quieter, gentler place to live.”

Shahum, thirty-five, first began to ride a bicycle as an inexpensive and reliable way to get to her nighttime restaurant jobs. But once in the mid-1990s, she found herself in a San Francisco café eavesdropping on someone who was talking to others about a bicycle advocacy newsletter. It was Dave Snyder, the scrappy grassroots bicycle advocate who helped grow the bicycle coalition from a tiny cluster into a strong, four thousand plus member organization. Ever since, she has been associated with the coalition, and in fact, in 2002, its board of directors appointed Shahum to replace Snyder, who was resigning. She has continued what Snyder and those before him began, working the corridors of San Francisco City Hall for more dedicated bicycle lanes, bicycle racks, streets engineered for bicycle safety, and legislation mandating the inclusion of bicycle parking facilities in new buildings.

With pride, Shahum and the five other full-time coalition staff members take credit for increasing membership to more than six thousand people—making the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition the largest per capita bicycle advocacy group in the country. (The equivalent organizations in New York City and Chicago actually have more members, but not compared to the overall populations of those cities.) And during Shahum’s tenure, city legislators have expanded the network of dedicated bicycle lanes by 30 percent to about forty miles—including stretches of bike lanes along Market Street, San Francisco’s main thoroughfare and the busiest bike route west of the Mississippi.

But besides advocating for improved bicycle conditions, Shahum and her staff host some of San Francisco’s most popular events.