Join us Sunday, April 23rd for a fun bike ride around (& around & around…) the Boston Public Garden to demonstrate to the City of Boston that we need safe bike facilities connecting our neighborhoods, paths, and parks NOW!

Meet us at Copley Square at 2pm, and we’ll ride to the Public Garden at 2:30. We’ll do laps around the Garden from 2:30pm-4:00pm. Feel free to ride as much or as little as you want and as slowly or as quickly as you want. This is not a race, but feel free to keep track of how many loops you do and brag about it to your friends at the after-party**. The ride will feature music, friends, and if we’re lucky a few fun-loving people will wear duckling costumes! (Costumes not required, but highly encouraged)

This ride is named after the popular children’s book “Make Way for Ducklings” because it perfectly illustrates how the roads surrounding the Public Garden feel dangerous and uncomfortable for most people since they encourage high motor vehicle speeds. However, these streets can easily accommodate protected bike lanes around the Public Garden with little impact on motor-vehicle capacity, while simultaneously making pedestrian crossings easier and safer.

This area, in the very heart of Boston, is a major missing link in the bike network. People biking along the Charles River who cross the Fiedler Footbridge are stranded on Beacon and Arlington Streets, which function as multi-lane speed ways at many times of day. Providing safe bicycle accommodations here will enable people to make connections toward Downtown, the Connect Historic Boston bike trail, Harborwalk, and the Southwest Corridor Bike Path.

The City of Boston has set a goal of quadrupling biking by 2030, but in order to achieve that goal, we need a connected network of protected bike lanes and low-stress routes, and the streets around the Public Garden are a great place to start.

Families are certainly welcome to join in the fun. In addition to having volunteers at all of the corners of the Gardeb, we are organizing a “Family Group Ride” with volunteers helping wrangle kids as a group. While there is safety in numbers, please keep in mind that we will be riding in mixed traffic, and sharing the road with cars. If you are interested in helping / volunteering to be a Kids Ride Marshal please email Jon Ramos: jramos@bostoncyclistsunion.org

**After-Party**
After the ride, please join us at “Cheers” located at 84 Beacon Street (you’ll pass it a bunch of times on the route).

More information can be found here.