Bike Riding in Greenbelt

BIKES IN GREENBELT

Greenbelt, Maryland was the first city in America whose developers considered traffic flow when they were designing the city.¹ Instead of the town growing around the roads, Tugwell designed Greenbelt around the sidewalks. Every home has access to at least one sidewalk, and once on a sidewalk you can go to any of the twenty-two playgrounds, the library, the pool, the tennis courts, the shopping area...any location in the town in accessible by sidewalk.

Now this might sound just like any other town where the sidewalks run parallel to the roads, but Greenbelt is not like that. The sidewalks in Greenbelt run between the rows of houses, through the open areas and their best feature is that they run under the major roads. This is the best idea I have ever seen in a neighborhood. This way kids can ride their bikes to all the recreation sites without having to stop at busy intersections and wait to cross the road safely. Just look at this picture, here we see people crossing safely under a main road in Greenbelt. This way people can go from one place to the next without having to worry about crossing roads, completely avoiding the possibility of being injured. Parents would be more at ease letting their children roam this neighborhood compared to parents in areas where there were not as many sidewalks and underpasses.

Using an underpass in Greenbelt.
"We are glad to see so many people using the underpasses." -- June Zoellner⁴

Personal Interview with Mr. Lee Schields ⁹

Mr. Lee Schields moved into Greenbelt during the town's first years with his family. As a child, he was taken in by the awe of the bicycle, and soon became bike master. Mr. Schields, like most children in Greenbelt in the beginning, did not have their own bicycle because they were expensive and families were still recovering from the Great Depression. In the third grade, Mr. Schields finally got his own bicycle, the years of waiting to ride his friends bike's were over. Now it was his turn to offer his bike to another kid anxious to go for a ride. His bike had about 15 years of experience before his parents bought it for him, $25 seemed to be the going rate for a used bike back in the late 1930's. The bicycle offered both kids and adults an opportunity to escape and the chance to get some exercise.

Not every child had a bicycle, some had scooters or tricycles as seen in this picture and the one above.¹¹

Bikes spelled FREEDOM. On his bike, Mr. Schields rode to the pool, school, to run errands for his parents, to the lake and around the community with his friends. As he got older he would ride to the Beltsville Agriculture Farm or down Greenbelt Road to Berwyn, where his wife is from. The bike was also a social status; your cool-ness was judged by what you could or could not do on a bike. For instance, the kids who could ride the fastest, ride with no hands or could pop a wheelie were held in reverence, and were looked up to by all those who could not perform such tricks.

He remembers a cartoonist visiting the school every year by the name of Dick Mansfield. Mr. Mansfield would draw on the chalk-boards while teaching the kids about safety, from bicycles to safety in the home. His lectures on bike safety expressed many of the same ideas as the article in the Cooperator did on the previous page. "Parents in Greenbelt tended to think their kids were safe there [riding their bikes]," most likely due to the safety lectures, safety publications and the extensive sidewalk and underpass system.

Click here to view typical 1930's era bicycles.
All the facts presented in the above three paragraphs are from the interview.....source #9.