About
The Reno/Sparks metropolitan area (hereinafter called Reno Metro), like most other post-war American cities, is primarily intended to be traveled using a car. The dependency on the automobile has allowed rapid, unorganized, and ungainly growth without provisions for alternate modes of transportation. The combination of regional desirability and low interest rates for home mortgages has driven the development of land-intensive, low-density housing, which in turn has driven the development of larger retail centers with larger parking lots. This cycle of urban sprawl and waste has led to the problems of air pollution, traffic congestion, never-ending road construction, and billions of dollars lost to road and utility maintenance, expansion, and construction.
There are few alternatives to the car.
The Citifare bus system is primarily designed for those with limited mobility; the disabled, the elderly, and occasionally, the drunk. Consequently, the Citifare route system has an abundance of stops and very few express routes, which makes riding the bus excruciatingly slow. It’s not unusual for a cross-town trip to take one and a half hours (a distance of 5-6 miles) each way.
Reno Metro currently has no intracity rail system, and there don’t seem to be any plans for one on the horizon. This is unfortunate because there are things we could be doing now to prepare for the day when such a system would become desirable; things like making sure we provide room for such a system between the roads and buildings we’re currently constructing.
This leaves us with the bicycle. The bicycle route network in Reno Metro (which includes bike paths, bike lanes, and streets signed as “Bike Routes”) is incomplete at best. The streets which are signed as bike routes (but have no other associated bicycle facilities) are usually no better than unmarked streets. Very few of the major Reno Metro thoroughfares have bike lanes, and of those that do, they almost never travel more than half of the length of the street. This results in tiny, remote “islands” of bike lanes scattered around the city.
The purpose of this site is to catalog and map the islands of bike facilities, provide support for those who use bikes for travel or recreation, and discuss ideas for how to make Reno Metro more bike friendly.