March 26, 2018
“I just always liked the speed at which you travel on a bike.” He said, “I think you get to interact with the places you are on a much more personal level.”
Tyler Dewey, Executive Director of BikeAthens, is focused on creating a comprehensive transportation network that all Athenians can use with confidence and ease. In recent years, he has assisted in the installation of many bike lanes on streets all around the Athens area. Dewey says he’s motivated by the want to create safer streets in Athens-Clarke County for future generations.
Public transportation has become a popular topic of conversation in Athens with the recent introduction of 12 new hybrid transit buses. These buses have numerous positive features like allowing more people to ride and offering lower emissions. According to the U.S. Census, Athens-Clarke County’s has a poverty rate of 27.9%, which is almost double all of its surrounding counties. This creates a high demand for public transportation because there are so many people relying on it to get around. Advancements to public transportation are beneficial to many groups of people within a city, but some might forget less common modes of public transportation like walking or biking.
BikeAthens has been focused on public transportation through walking and biking for years. After finishing law school, Dewey was offered a job that combines his love for biking and his knowledge or legal handlings. He became the executive director of BikeAthens in 2011, and has been trying to make a change through advocacy, education and community service ever since. Jason Perry, Program Coordinator for the Office of Sustainability at the University of Georgia and President of the BikeAthens board, continues to believe Dewey is the perfect person for the job. He attributes his law degree as the main reason he is so effective in public meetings and keeping track of any potential issues. “He’s always there, watching. He’s able to see things as they’re happening and warn us if there are concerns about public transportation,” said Perry on the phone.
However, his law degree isn’t what got him interested in bikes. Dewey has been around bikes since he was a kid in Illinois. Growing up, his dad was always a big admirer of riding bikes and treated them as engineering art. His family consistently went on camping trips around the Midwest where they would ride bikes on trails and visit new places. He continued to go on these trips with just his dad as he got older, going on these bike trips as often as possible. “When I was 15, we rode from Seattle, Washington to Minnesota on a tandem bike and went camping in between” says Dewey. He even rode bikes as often as he could when he was a Peace Corps volunteer in Kazakhstan for two and a half years. Today, he continues to ride around Athens in his free time and enjoys the hills that the Midwest never offered.
His biking background is exactly what fuels him to make positive changes for biking because he knows the benefits of biking on safe streets. Having completely safe streets that include bike lanes or streets mindful of bikers is a large task. However, Dewey is currently working with local government on a bike master plan called Athens in Motion. The project is a massive undertaking that would create a complete biking network around Athens-Clarke County. The design would include various types of construction for different areas, but they would ultimately all accommodate biking equally. Dewey has been a big supporter of this project for a long time and has been very vocal about the importance of it being completed. The process to create, map, and execute a project like this takes years, but Dewey believes it would make Athens a regional biking hub years ahead of any other city in the southeast.
BikeAthens has a number of different programs, but the most popular is the bike-recycling program. This allows the volunteers at BikeAthens to refurbish bikes and then donate them to a person who is in need of a bike. The person receives the bike, a helmet, a light, and a lock to ensure they have what they need to be safe. BikeAthens donated around 175 bikes to people in need last year while completing around 30 walk-in repairs per month. However, Christmas time is a huge opportunity for BikeAthens to donate a large number of bikes to kids in the Athens area. Susie Weller said on the phone, “For many years now, we’ve gotten truckloads of refurbished bikes around Christmas time for our clients that give them to their kids. We’ve built a strong support network with each other over the years.” Dewey is a big supporter of this program because of the change it can bring to someone’s life. The majority of the people that need these bikes are in poverty or are trying to escape poverty through looking for a job. Having a bike always people to not need to rely on other methods of public transportation and organize their days based on when the bus gets to certain stops. Some of the people in need of a bike actually come into BikeAthens to talk to someone, but the majority of the bikes donated are through local service partners like The Sparrow’s Nest and Children First. These organizations reach out to BikeAthens and let them know about the person’s situation, and BikeAthens gives that person one of their refurbished bikes as soon as they can. Sydney McCall, an employee at The Sparrow’s Nest said on the phone, “Tyler always hand delivers the bikes to the person in need. He goes over how to use the bike and the lock and always gives them information on how to be a safe rider.”
From childhood to adulthood, bikes have always been a large part of Dewey’s life. However, he’s transitioned from biking as a hobby to giving those less fortunate an opportunity to improve their lives with a different mode of transportation. With that transition, he has realized that his personal goals have changed and become focused on helping others over anything else. In he future, he hopes to make Athens-Clarke County completely biker friendly with safe streets through education, advocacy, and community service.
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