July 2018 was a busy month for our involvement at bike advocacy. But we are not complaining, because it is all good! Here are some of the things that we did.
Ethel and I were invited to a Technical Working Group Meeting to give our thoughts on the present Comprehensive Sustainable Transport Bill being worked out in Congress. This is an aggregation of all bills pertaining to urban transport - it is quite massive in scope but if passed this will only mean good things for our country. Thanks to Congressman Cesar Sarmiento of Catanduanes for allowing us to give our two centavos worth on non motorized transport issues!
A week later, I biked from our place in QC to attend a talk on Sustainable Transport hosted by a new group interested in bettering urban mobility, AltMobilityPh. This was their initial public meet, and we touched base with a lot like-minded people who are concerned about the burgeoning transport crisis,
We also attended a Round Table Discussion on Road Safety, a talk hosted by the Bloomberg Initiatives for Global Road Safety. With us here are road safety luminaries Dr. Jojo Go of WHO and DOTr Asec Mark Richmund de Leon. Talks like these are important for the non motorized sector as we are part of the transportation landscape.
With fellow bike advocate Jose Cortez, we are planning out a scheme with LRT Line 1 that will meld trains and bicycles together. This is a work in progress so I really can't say much about it now, but stay tuned!
And lastly, the Rappler Vlog that Ethel and I participated in finally came out. In this video, we, along with Road Safety Advocate and host Vince Lazatin, and fellow bike advocate Jose Cortez (again!) rode through the bike lane networks of three cities in Metro Manila and then sat down and talked about our experience, Hopefully this becomes a talking point so that we can improve and increase bike lanes in the metro. Please view the video here: https://www.rappler.com/move-ph/issues/road-safety/207678-right-of-way-bike-commuting-to-beat-traffic?utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=Inhouse_video&utm_campaign=move-ph
As bicycle advocates, we rode to most of these events on our folding bikes, and we do get a lot of questions and comments about how handy they are. Our bikes of choice are the Tern P18 and the Bickerton Pilot 1707, both great handling bikes that easily fold down to a compact package.
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